


The Call

by sirtalen



Series: Judy and Nick's Tales [1]
Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Drama, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Organized Crime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-03-24
Packaged: 2018-10-10 00:42:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 25,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10425426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirtalen/pseuds/sirtalen
Summary: In the aftermath of a vicious attack on Judy, Nick has to deal with a new player entering Zootopia's criminal world.





	1. The Call

There were days when Chief Bogo could still feel good about being a cop. When they collared a criminal that the force had been chasing for too long. When a civilian said "Thank you" in the tone that let you know you really had made the world a little better, at least for one person.

Today was not one of those days.

"Sir, I'd like to make the call, if you're willing," Wilde asked. His tail was limp, his ears were flopped down in exhaustion, but there was no hint in his stance or voice of the need he had to be feeling to either scream or break down sobbing.

"What you need to be doing is reporting to the ZPD counselor, Officer Wilde," Bogo said. "This part is my job."

"Chief, they don't know you," Wilde said, his ears flicking back in challenge. "I've visited that little farm of theirs, played with their kids. They know me. They trust me." He didn't have to add, _They trusted me to keep her safe._

Bogo stared down at Wilde. The sly fox, _the officer_ , didn't back down or break his gaze.

"Five minutes," Bogo finally said. "Then you go the counselor, and do what she tells you to do and tell her what she needs to know, not what she wants to hear. Got it?"

"Thank you, Chief." Wilde pulled out his mobile, looked at it, then shoved back into his pocket, choosing instead to use the phone on Bojo's desk, making it official. He dialed in the number, then waited, foot tapping impatiently in a manner more bunny than fox. Then his face relaxed into a smile, ears popping back up, the charm turning on like a switch. "Hey, that you Tommy? Yeah, it's me, Nick. Is your mom around? I'd like to talk to her for a minute." His gaze flicked up to Bogo, the smile dropping away, put back into its box until it was needed again. "She's out in the fields," he reported.

"You don't want to talk to her dad first?"

Wilde shook his head. "He wouldn't be able to keep it together." He turned his attention back to the phone, the switch turning back on briefly. "Bonnie? Hi, it's Nick." He took in a deep breath. "Okay, first things first; Judy is alive, but she's in the hospital. She was hurt..." He paused. Though Bogo's ears weren't as big as Hopps' or Wilde's, he could easily hear the horrified exclamation coming out of the receiver. "She was hurt while we were out on patrol. She's been in surgery for, um..." His face blanked out, the fatigue he'd been trying to ignore overwhelming him for a moment.

"Five hours," Chief Bogo provided.

"Five hours," Nick repeated, giving Bogo a nod of thanks. "Yeah, um, she was trying to make a collar on this polar bear we'd been tailing. Russian mobsters, not Mr. Big's boys."

_The sonovabitch almost **gutted her**_ , Wilde had said in his verbal report. _I was two steps behind her, I swear to God, two steps._ Then Nick had to let the bastard go, because he was too busy screaming _officer down_ into his radio, while his other paw was in Hopps' stomach, trying to grab the artery that had been ripped apart and clamp it shut with his fingers.

Bogo reminded himself to give Clawhauser another commendation. Not only had he routed backup and an ambulance to Hopps and Wilde's position in less than two minutes, he'd also kept the fox officer talking, not letting him shut down, not letting him think about what had just happened, and most especially not giving him time to look at the gun at his belt and wonder whether it would be better to shove it down his own muzzle and pull the trigger, rather than face the grinding ordeal that was going to be coming in the next few hours, days, weeks, and perhaps years.

Wilde was going on. "Yeah, well, Zootopia General is one of the best hospitals around," he said, his expression perking up as he tried to will confidence into his voice to carry down the phone line. "They have mouse surgeons who wear these full body surgical suits and go right inside the vic... the patient's body. Fix whatever's wrong, and then stitch it up so tight you'd need a microscope to see their work. They got a whole team working on her right now." Another pause. "Yeah, okay. I'll tell the chief. If anything changes I'll call your mobile, okay? See you."

He hung up the phone, then said, "They'll be down in about four or five hours. Gotta call their neighbors to watch all the kids."

"Good."

"I... I guess I'll see the counselor now," Wilde said, his voice going flat, drained of emotion.

"Sit down," Chief Bogo ordered.

"Sir, with all due respect, if I sit down I won't be able to get back up again."

" _Sit. Down._ "

Wilde sat, thumping down in the chair across from Bogo's desk, tail curled across his lap. "Sir?"

"I need to talk to you about the investigation that's coming up. Before you say anything, I will tell you right now that you won't be leading it. You are too emotionally involved at this point, and you are incapable of thinking straight." Bogo paused, then added, "I speak from experience in this."

"I... I thought you might be, sir," Wilde said quietly. "Is there anything else?"

"Just one thing," Bogo said. "In ten minutes I'm going to be leading an all hands briefing with every officer in this precinct. They'll be listening to me, but they are going to be looking at you. Now every single one of them is going want that mobster's head for what they did to Ju... Officer Hopps. But I want them to do it by the book. I want an _arrest_ , and I want every criminal in this city who thinks they can hurt one of our own to know that we will find them, no matter where they hide. But that's not going to happen if they look at you and see your fangs are out and that you want to taste blood."

"I am not the Chief of Police, and I am not made out of stone, sir," Wilde said stiffly.

"You wouldn't be a good cop if you were, Officer Wilde," Bogo said. "But a good cop, the one who answers the call to serve, does not act out of revenge, no matter what the temptation. No one goes into this line of work for the money, or thinking how fun it would be to confront armed lunatics every day. I know Officer Hopps didn't. Nor did you. But if you've changed your mind, if that's what you want your brother officers to do for in return for what was done to Hopps, I want your badge right now."

"That... won't be necessary, sir," Wilde said quietly. He looked at Bogo, his green eyes intent. "How do you get up in the morning, and keep doing this? How do you do it when you know you might end the day having a conversation like this with one of your officers, when his partner is in the hospital and might never come out?"

Bogo templed his fingers together on his desk. "Some days I don't know, Wilde, I really don't. But if it isn't going to be me, then who else?"

He nodded. "Understood, sir."

"Dismissed, Wilde. Go see the counselor."

Wilde stood, saluted, then turned away, his tail dragging wearily behind him. Bogo watched him go, then picked up his phone. As much as he might want to stop time, tomorrow was going to come whether he wanted it to or not.

But he had known that when he'd taken this job.


	2. Mr. Big

Nick knew he had to get some sleep. This shift had started over twenty-four hours ago. He and Judy had just been ready to drive back to the station at the end of their normal twelve hours when he had spotted the Russian polar bear climbing out of an SUV and heading down towards one of the warehouses by the docks. Why the hell hadn't he just let the guy go on his merry way was beyond his ability to reason now. Of course once he had pointed him out to Judy there was no stopping her from following the bear to see what he was up to.

They'd tailed him for close to four hours, observing how he'd left the warehouse looking very smug and satisfied, then took a walk along the docks to speak to a certain team of otter longshoremen, then moved on to the shipping terminal offices. Somewhere along the way he must have spotted his tail. No matter how good a sneaky fox and a little bunny were at hiding, they couldn't disguise their police uniforms.

Then he'd made that turn into the alley, Judy following on his heels, and Nick _two damned steps_ behind them both. Just in time to see Judy's body go flying out of the alley, blood trailing from her torn belly, to strike the wall across the damned _street_ with the sound of crunching bones. Then he was screaming into his radio for an ambulance, trying to stop the bleeding, nothing in the damned Junior Ranger Scout manual having ever said anything about bandaging gut wounds or sewing up internal injuries.

Now Judy was in the hospital, and her parents were trying to break the land speed record in that rusty pickup truck of theirs to see their daughter in case it might be the last chance they ever had. Nick had left her to give his report, make the call to them, and mumble answers to the ZPD crisis counselor's questions until she finally let him go with an admonition to get some sleep and a prescription for something to help him get to dreamland. Which he immediately stuffed into the next waste bin he passed, because dreaming was the absolute last thing he wanted to do.

"Officer Wilde?" a deep voice asked. Nick blinked, looking up to see Kevin, one of Mr. Big's own polar bears, looming over him at the bus stop, where he'd been waiting to catch the Number 7 back to his apartment. "Mr. Big would like to see you," Kevin went on in his accented English

"Kevin, buddy, now is _not_ the best time," Nick intoned flatly. Kevin was one Mr. Big's brighter minions. Who knew, he might actually take the hint and bug off.

Kevin nodded, then said, "Mr. Big is aware that you might be distressed. He wishes to discuss the reasons for your distress with you."

Nick's ears went flat, and he managed to summon enough energy to say, "In the morning."

"He said you come now." Kevin then cut the argument short by picking Nick by the collar of his uniform shirt, at least it wasn't by his neck, and carry the officer bodily over to the waiting limousine.

"You're assaulting an officer," Nick noted, but his heart wasn't into even a cursory insult.

The drive was less than twenty minutes. Nick spent it in a half doze on the comfortably padded leather seats of the limo. When it stopped he was guided by the elbow to an office, _not_ the one with the trapdoor over the river, thank goodness, and sat in front of a very large desk with a very small rodent dressed in a very small tuxedo, sitting in an equally small chair on top of it.

"Mr. Big." Nick tried to gather together his fraying concentration, because pissing off the powerful crime lord wasn't the cherry he wanted to put on top of an already horrible day. "I'm sorry, but I'm really not up to polite conversation right now. Could we make this sho-, quick?"

"Nicholas," the septuagenarian rodent said in a raspy voice, "I will not keep you long from your bed. But my grandchildren, they are crying, you understand. They are asking, 'Grandfather, why is our Godmother Judy in the hospital? Why would someone hurt our lovely godmother, Officer Judy?'" Behind Nick, Kevin crossed himself briefly, looking sorrowful.

"Then you can tell them that their Godmother Judy is in the hospital, because her stupid, _slow_ , partner Nick couldn't save her from being hurt," he ground out between clenched fangs.

"I know your Judy, Nicholas. If you were too slow, it's only because Officer Judy was too quick. Always she is ready jump ahead, to see who needs to be helped, to see what is to be found." He drew in a breath. "You are not the one that hurt her. It was that _pezzo di merda_ Russian bear."

"I know, I know." But knowing that wouldn't quiet down the thought that he should have done _something_ to save her.

"You wish to find this bear?"

"Yes, but he's just a go-between," Nick said. "The ZPD knows he's working for the head of Mafiya, but we haven't been able to connect him to anybody yet." He felt his claws digging into his paw pads, and quickly placed both palms on his knees, before he drew blood. "We need a _name_."

"Volkov," Mr. Big rasped. "The one you are truly looking for is called Volkov."

"Why didn't you tell us this before?" Nick demanded, too ragged and tired to think better about addressing the shrew in such a sharp tone.

Mr. Big shrugged. "I did not know this before. But the bear you hunt, he likes his drink. Someone in a bar heard him talking about hurting the famous bunny police officer, about how his boss Volkov was so pleased. That person spoke to Kevin, who spoke to me."

Suddenly awake and alert, Nick pushed himself out of the chair, not waiting to be dismissed. "I gotta call this in. I'll tell chief Bogo that a... um, a concerned citizen gave me a tip."

"You do that, Nicholas." Mr. Big stood up, and how a four inch tall shrew could suddenly _loom_ was something Nick would never be able to figure out. "You tell your Chief Bogo that your concerned citizen is very angry about what was done to Officer Hopps. You also tell him that he has three days."

"Three days? What do you mean three days?" Nick asked, swaying on his feet suddenly as an imaginary trap door opened underneath him. Beside him, Kevin grabbed his shoulder with one meaty paw to steady him.

"In three days, if the ZPD does not find this Volkov, _I_ will find him," Mr. Big declared.

Nick's ears laid back flat against his head. "You're talking about a war?"

"Yes, Nicholas. Volkov's bear, he thought he was just hurting a silly bunny cop. He did not know he was hurting _family_. You wish to attack Mr. Big, that is just business. You attack my grandchildren's godmother, that is _war_."

He swallowed. "Mr. Big, please. We've got a new crime family in the city causing trouble, and my chief is trying to ride herd on a bunch _very angry_ cops, who are going to be looking for this Volkov too. Zootopia doesn't need a crime war on top of this. It hasn't been a year since the Night Howler case was wrapped up. Things are too unsettled right now. A war might break this city apart."

"That is why I give you three days, Nicholas," Mr. Big said, his thick eyebrows turned down in anger. "I love Zootopia too. Little Rodentia is a place of safety, prosperity, for my people. I will not have this Russian and his bears _stepping on it_." He sat back down on his padded leather chair. "Three days, Nicholas. If you do not find him in three days, I start hunting these bears, and your Chief Bogo and the rest of ZPD would be safest staying out of the way. You tell Chief Bogo that Mr. Big said this."

Nick swallowed again, his throat dry with fear. "I will, sir."


	3. Visiting Hours

"Honestly, Stu. Can't you go any faster? People are passing us," Bonnie said urgently. She grabbed for the _oh, carrots_ strap beside the door as an 18-wheeler zoomed by them in the highway's right lane, setting the old farm truck rocking in its wake.

"I go any faster I'll overheat the engine, you know that. We only bought this one to run produce over to the stand," Stu said, keeping his eyes on the road. "Told ya we needed a new truck."

"We needed the tractor repaired more," she said. Which was true, but what she wouldn't give for one of those fancy SUV's now, instead of this twenty-year old rusty dusty pickup truck. They'd been on the road six hours now, and she couldn't help but think it would have just been faster to take the train, but when Nick's call had come all either of them could think of was getting out the door _now_.

"Time was I could've repaired the tractor m'self," Stu went on. "These fancy new machines they're putting out with all that 'proprietary' software in the engines. _Hmph!_ Used to be I could put the motor back together with a wrench and a spare can of motor oil, not have to call some trade school tech to come out because the whole works are more complicated than the darned Space Shuttle."

Bonnie didn't argue with him about that one. She knew Stu was just venting about the tractor and truck to keep himself from thinking about Judy. She was doing the same thing herself, because if she thought too much about it all she'd be able to do is cry, and she couldn't cry right now. _I knew this was going to happen, she thought. I knew it. I should have to told her no. I should have told her to stay on the farm like a normal bunny. Not run off to that horrible city. Not put on that damned uniform she wanted so much. Not **dream.**_

"There she is," Stu said, as the highway curved around a hill. Rising in the distance were a line of tall buildings, glowing like gold in the setting sun, stretching all along the horizon it seemed. Zootopia, the oldest and greatest city of all the animal kingdoms. Zootopia, center of trade, of the arts, of politics.

Zootopia, the city that _ate_ her daughter.

"Turn the GPS back on, Stu," she told him.

"I know, I know," he said, flicking it on. "Need to fix the cigarette lighter in this thing so we don't run down the battery."

Even with the GPS they got turned around twice, until Bonnie could only rapid-tap her foot on the rusty floor of the truck to keep herself from screaming at Stu to hurry up. "Watch it, Stu. You almost went into the mouse lane," she said, as he passed a bus.

"I know, I know," he muttered again, leaning over the dash as he tried to keep track of the traffic surrounding them.

 _Right turn ahead. Your destination is on the right,_ the GPS informed them. Then they turned the corner and the white washed concrete and glass tower of Zootopia General was in front of them, just like the views she'd seen on the TV when the news about the Night Howler attacks had broken out. "Where do we park?" she wondered.

"Across the street I think," Stu said. "See, there's a sky bridge connecting the hospital to the garage." He turned in and got a parking ticket from the machine (seven dollars an hour, God help them) and found a parking spot. "All right," he said. He straightened his gimme cap on his head and helped her out the truck. "Ready, Hon?"

Bonnie nodded and squeezed his paw. "Ready, Stu."

Paw in paw they walked up the stairs to the sky bridge and across it into the hospital lobby. Together they approached a wide desk manned by a giraffe, the words "Information" in large polished brass letters over her head.

"Excuse me," Bonnie said to the giraffe. "We're Stu and Bonnie Hopps." She swallowed, her throat suddenly tight. "Our daughter Judy was admitted here last night." Beside her, Stu squeezed her paw so tight it almost hurt.

"Hopps? Oh, of course," the giraffe said brightly. She tapped something into her computer. "Your daughter is in the Small Mammals ICU, room 23. I'll get your visitor bracelets."

"Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Hopps?" a loud voice called out to their right. Bonnie turned to find a camera as big as the prize winning cannon from last year's pumpkin chunkin' contest pointed right at her face, while a white snow leopardess in a pantsuit held a microphone up to her. "Fabienne Growley, ZNN News. Could we have some comment on the horrible attack on your daughter, Officer Judy Hopps? Have you heard any further word on her condition? Are you worried for her safety, since her attacker is still at large?"

Frozen, Bonnie could only stutter, "I, um, we haven't heard... I..."

"Oh, sorry!" another voice cut in. Suddenly the biggest, _fattest_ cheetah Bonnie had ever seen, dressed in a police uniform and carrying a large box of donuts and a bouquet of daisies under one arm, slide up beside them. "I'm really sorry," he said cheerfully, coming between Bonnie and the cannon/camera. "The investigation is ongoing, so they're unable to comment. Chief Bogo and the provisional mayor will be issuing a statement to the press shortly, no idea when. Super great to meet you, Miss Growley. I love your show!" With his free paw he snatched a pair paper ID bracelets from the giraffe at the desk, hip checked the cameraman out of the way, and began herding Bonnie and Stu towards the elevators. "Let's go this way. That's it. Here we go." Then suddenly they were in the elevator, the doors shutting out the reporter's questions and bringing blessed quiet.

"Whew!" the cheetah said, leaning against the wall. "I love her show, but _honestly_!" He held out his paw to shake theirs as the elevator moved upward. "Officer Benjamin Clawhauser, ZPD. Super great to meet you, sir, ma'am."

"Nice to meet you too, Officer," Bonnie said gratefully, taking one the bracelets and slipping it over her wrist. "Are you a friend of Judy's?"

Clawhauser nodded and smiled, fat jowls shaking. "Oh, yes! I'm usually at the front desk at Precinct One, so I talk to her all the time. Judy is just the sweetest bunny in the world! Everybody loves her. Well, Chief Bogo just kinda growls a little more softly around her, but that's how the chief is."

"Yes, Judy always knew, _knows_ , how to make friends," Bonnie agreed softly. Beside her, Stu squeezed her paw again.

The smile dropped from Clawhauser's face. "We're all awfully worried for her at the precinct station. It's... it's really tense around there at the moment. I was just coming off my shift, and I thought it would be nice to see her. Y'know, just in case, um..." His voiced faded and he finished miserably, "...in case."

The elevator doors opened, and a nurse at the floor desk pointed them towards room 23. The door was shut, with a uniformed ZPD officer, a fierce looking wolf, standing by the door.

"Why is there a guard?" Stu asked. "Do you always have one when an officer is hurt?"

"Well, no," Clawhauser explained. "But we do when the officer in question is well known to the public. You never never when some lone nut..." He cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Anyway, do you want me to come in with you?"

"Yes, please," Bonnie told him. She and Stu both took a deep breath and pushed the door open. Then Bonnie let out a soft, despairing, "Oh, God."

Her daughter lay in a hospital bed in the middle of the room, her eyes closed, a breathing tube down her throat, her left forearm shaved and a needle inserted in her arm, leading to a saline bag hanging from a stand beside the bed. The other arm was set in a cast leading all the way up to her shoulder, and her neck was encased in a plastic brace. She was dressed only in a hospital gown, and the bed cover was drawn all the way up to her chin. Beside the bed a bank of machines watched over her, amber lines recording her vital signs, bleeping softly.

"Oh... Oh, she's so _small_ ," Stu said, then turned towards Bonnie and started crying into her shoulder, while she patted his back gently.

Clawhauser glanced at them briefly, and then crept forward towards the bed. "Hi, Judy," he said softly. "I brought flowers, and donuts. I know you can't eat the donuts right now, but, I figured, I don't know. I mean everybody like donuts, right? Anyway... um, here." He set the offering on a small table beside the bed. Then Bonnie's eyes followed him as he turned towards the front of the room.

"Where... where did all those _come_ from?" she asked. Sitting on a large table were what seemed like dozens of bouquets, in all the colors of the rainbow, filling the room with their sweet fragrances, including two large garlands that flanked the table on either side.

"Oh, let's see." Clawhauser set his on bouquet on one the few uncovered spaces on the table, and started reading off the cards. "Well, the big one on the right is from our precinct, and the one on the left is from the Little Rodentia Business Protection Association. This really pretty one with the pink and blue roses is from Mr. and Mrs. Otterton. Mr. Otterton was one of the Night Howler victims, y'know. This one here is from East Saharan Elementary School. I think she and Nick did a class visit there once. This one that's wilting a bit is from somebody named Flash..."

"My goodness," Bonnie said softly. "So many people. You mean all of them know our Judy?"

"Like you said, she knows how to make friends. It's kinda her superpower," Clawhauser said, smiling a little.

Beside Judy's bed a little door opened, and a hamster dressed in scrubs and lab coat emerged, a rodent sized laptop under his arm, walking along a waist sized shelf built into the walls of the room. "Mr. and Mrs. Hopps?" he asked. "I'm Dr. Weismouser, your daughter's attending physician. If now is a good time, I'd like to go over her current condition with you."

"I'll be outside," Clawhauser said, slipping out the door and closing it behind himself. Beside her, Stu pulled his face out of Bonnie's now thoroughly wet shoulder to wipe his eyes and look at the doctor.

Dr. Weismouser started by plugging his laptop into a station on the shelf, connected by a wire to a display over Judy's bed. "First off, how much detail would you like me to go into with you about your daughter's injuries? I have to warn you that they're quite extensive."

Stu straightened up, his expression firm. "We're farmers, Doctor. We're not afraid of a little blood and guts. Give it to us straight." Bonnie nodded in agreement.

Weismouser tapped into his laptop, and an MRI image of Judy's body appeared on the big screen, individual areas being highlighted as the hamster began his explanation. "Very well. First off, Officer Hopps' attacker struck her in the stomach with his claws, opening three large, diagonal wounds in her abdominal wall. The cuts sliced though her large intestine, and also tore open her celiac artery, the major blood vessel leading into her stomach. This accounts for the majority of her blood loss, though fortunately her partner was able to stem the flow sufficiently that the paramedics were able to stabilize her. In addition, when her attacker stuck her, he ended up propelling her over fifty feet across the street, where she struck a brick wall and fell an additional ten feet to the ground."

Bonnie's ears lowered, and her nose began twitching in distress. "Go on," she said.

"From Officer Wilde's report, it would seem that impact accounts for her shoulder, which was shattered in two places, the hairline fracture on the back of her skull, and the wrenching of the top of her spinal column. The neck brace is to relieve stress on her ligaments in that area. Though bunnies are lightweight when compared to other mammals, when she fell to the ground three of her ribs were broken, one them puncturing her lung and causing it to collapse." The doctor closed his laptop and the display vanished. "That about sums up her injuries."

"Well then," Bonnie said, swallowing to retain her composure, Stu's paw gripping hers so tightly now it hurt, "What are you doing to help her?"

Weismouser gestured towards Judy's stomach. "Our trauma team went in and immediately sewed up the artery to prevent further blood loss. From there they were mostly concerned with restructuring her stomach. She's lost about five inches of intestine, and will be on a liquid diet for at least a month. We also of course sewed up the hole in her lung, then successfully re-inflated it, and will be setting pins in her shoulder to stabilize it when she's strong enough for additional surgery. In the meantime we are keeping her in a chemically induced coma and on a respirator to minimize the stress on her body."

Bonnie felt Stu relax slightly. "So she will recover?" he asked in hope.

Dr. Weismouser paused, before answering carefully, "I think we should look at things realistically, Mr. Hopps.

"What's 'realistically' mean?" Stu said. "Is our daughter going to wake up or not?"

The doctor shrugged. "You are farmers, as you said. I'm sure you understand the limits of biology. Bunnies and other small mammals simply don't the same margins of recovery and reserves that larger mammals enjoy. Drop an anvil on an elephant or a buffalo, and they'll just give you the evil eye before trampling you. Do the same to a bunny or a weasel, and they'd be crushed. That said, your daughter endured injuries that would have simply have killed a mouse, a shrew, or hamster like myself. If we can prevent a post-op secondary infection from settling in, then chances are good that she might recover. The problem is her reserves of energy are exhausted. Her body is doing everything it can to heal, and that leaves her vulnerable to even smallest of infections or viruses."

"I see, doctor," Bonnie said. "So when will we know anything?"

"It will be at least three or four days before we can consider taking her out of her coma. After that, given the amount of time she spent under, it will be a week or more before she could be considered, er, coherent. If she survives that long, her chances for a full recovery are good, though she will likely have to pass a physical before she's permitted to take up policing duties again." He rocked on his feet uncomfortably. "I should mention that as part of being a police officer, your daughter signed a living will. Should her condition grow, er, tenuous, we would have to ask your permission before removing her from life support."

Bonnie and Stu both looked at the floor for a bit, before they were able to face Dr. Weismouser again. "We understand," she said. "You'll let us know if anything changes? I mean, you'll let us know immediately?"

"The nurses have your contact information, yes. I assume you'll be staying in town?"

"For now. We can only stay a few days. Planting is coming up and we have be back home for that."

"All right then. I'll leave you with Judy for now. Good day to you both." Bonnie and Stu both held out a finger claw for the doctor to shake, and then he headed out the same small door he'd entered in.

Stu pulled a pair of plastic chairs from the side of the room, and they both sat, staring Judy silently, watching the rise and fall of her chest as the machines breathed for her. "Hey, Jude the Dude," he said softly after a bit. "You're scaring your momma something awful. You'd better wake up soon and apologize to her."

"We should have never let her go to the academy," Bonnie whispered. "We should have told her no. I knew something like this was going to happen, I _knew it_."

Stu sighed. "Oh, now Bonnie. You know we couldn't stopped her. She'd always had her heart set on helping folks."

"Then she could have become a nurse, or a doctor, or scientist. Anything but a police officer!" Bonnie cried. Then Stu was wrapping his arms around her and rocked her as she wept for her daughter.

About ten minutes passed, allowing Bonnie to recovery from her crying jag, before there was a knock at the door. It opened, and a large buffalo entered the room, dressed in a uniform similar to Clawhauser's, but with four gold stars at his shoulder epaulets. "Mr. and Mrs. Hopps?" he said, in a deep Afrikaans accent. "Forgive me, but I'm Chief Bogo of the Zootopia Police Dept. You might not remember, but we met at last year's police academy graduation when Hopps' partner, Wilde, was inducted into the force. I just came around to check on Hopps, and see how you were doing."

"Oh, yes, I remember," Bonnie said hoarsely. "We're fine. Everyone has been very kind."

"Good." Chief Bogo seemed to pull in his shoulders a bit, trying to fit himself into the small room. "I want to personally reassure you that we are doing everything we can to find the person who did this to Judy."

 _He looks tired,_ Bonnie thought. She wondered if he'd gotten as little sleep as she and Stu had. "Thank you, Chief. I know Judy always spoke very highly of you."

"She did?" Chief said, looking surprised, then muttered half to himself, "God only knows why." He shook his head and went on, "At any rate, if you need anything, anything at all, feel free to contact me at the station any time, day or..." He was interrupted as Gazelle's latest number, _Zootopia Strong_ , starting playing in the front pocket of his shirt. He growled in annoyance and snatched out his phone, snapping, "Bogo here." After a moment he let out a louder growl. "Wilde, I told you to report to the counselor and then get some _rest_. You are not on this case. If you persist on pursuing it I will put you on administrative leave and then write you up for disobeying... What...? _Who's_ responsible?" Chief Bogo pulled out a pen and notepad from his pocket, switching the phone to his left hand as he scribbled something down. "All right, excellent. Now go _rest_. You've done all you c-." He paused again, listening, "He said _what? Shit_. Thank you, Wilde, we'll get right on it. Now _sleep_."

Bonnie shared a glanced with Stu as Bogo put his phone away, and then asked, "Is everything all right?"

"We have a lead on the bear that mauled Judy. More importantly, we have a lead on the mammal he's working for. Unfortunately a, um, _concerned citizen_ with some local power is involving himself in a way that is only to make things very complicated." Bogo glanced at them, his mind seeming to try and focus on a dozen threads at once. "Please stay here for now. I'm going to assign a plainclothes officer to escort you to your hotel and act as your, er, guide while you're both in city. Please don't go anywhere until he arrives."

"What going on? What's the matter?" Bonnie demanded.

"I can't discuss an ongoing investigation with civilians. I'm sorry, I know you have a right, but I just can't. Good day to you both." Chief Bogo bowed himself out, closing the door firmly behind him. Faintly they could hear him speaking Clawhauser and the wolf officer, saying, "Stay right here and watch over the Hoppses. We've got three days to find this bastard before things go completely to hell!"


	4. Glass Houses

Kevin dropped Nick off back at his new place. One of the advantages of having a steady salary was that he could afford a bit better than "Box under a bridge" these days. One of the disadvantages was that it was the same lousy apartment complex as Judy, because a cop's salary only went so far, especially when he was still sending half of it to his mom each month.

His call to Chief Bogo had been short, and predictable. Bogo didn't like the idea of a gang war any more than Nick did, especially with the awkward complication that it might be triggered because one of the city's most recently decorated officers had family ties to one of the gang's in question. The chief had hung up muttering, after ordering him to get some sleep finally.

Nick was inclined to agree with that order, pulling himself into his apartment and sitting down at the little table near the kitchenette. _Dinner first_ , he thought. He hadn't eaten, hadn't really felt like eating, since about ten pm when he and Carrots had grabbed coffee and pastries from Stardoes just before everything went to hell. _Dinner then bed_ , because there was a female voice at the back of his head that was half his mom's and half Judy's, telling him that he was too skinny and needed to take care of himself.

He ended up nuking a fish patty and slathering it with horseradish, because using ketchup right now would remind him…

Okay, he just didn't feel like ketchup tonight.

Nick shoved the patty down his throat without really tasting it, and chased it down with some blueberry fruit juice from the fridge. Then he took a hot shower, scrubbing himself down a bit longer than strictly necessary. He'd washed his paws clean of Judy's blood and switched into a fresh uniform in the locker room before calling the Hoppses earlier, but he'd earned a lot of sweat today, especially during his interview with Mr. Big.

What next? _Bed._ Right. Because he'd promised Chief Bogo that he'd rest, and a Scout always kept his promises. After climbing onto the squeaky springs of his bed, he spent a half hour staring at the ceiling, before he turned the light back on and shoved his dad's old _Best of Billy Vole_ cassette into the tape player he'd scrounged after getting the apartment, setting the earphones on his head, and laying back down in the dark to listen to the scratchy magnetic track.

_What's the matter with the clothes I'm wearing?  
"Can't you tell that your tie's too wide?"_

Carrots had laughed when she'd seen it. "What was that about Mr. Big still listening to CD's?" she'd asked.

_Maybe I should buy some old tab collars?  
"Welcome back to the age of Jive."_

"Classic Rock, classic format," Nick had told her with a grin. She'd let it pass and finished helping him move, which was fine by him. Dad was a… _complicated_ subject, and he hadn't felt like trying to explain him to her.

He kept listening, the long since memorized lyrics not soothing him at all. _Dumb bunny,_ he tried to think, hopping ahead, eager to collar a suspicious bear eight times her size. What had she thought she was doing, anyway?

_How about a pair of pink sidewinders,_  
And a bright orange pair of pants?  
"You could be a real Beau Bunny baby  
If you just give it half a chance." 

Yeah, and what had he thought he was doing over twenty years ago, trying to be the first predator in the Junior Ranger Scouts and expecting to be accepted? Well, in his defense, he had been eight years old at the time. _Yeah, so what's your excuse now, Mr. First Fox Police Officer? Think you're going to be accepted by anyone at the ZPD after you let your partner get hurt?_

_Dumb fox. Slow fox._

They had to nail this Volkov fast, or the claws would be out at Mr. Big's organization. Then things would rapidly spiral out of control, because while Mr. Big had this little bit of morality that said you should avoid getting civilians involved in your blood feuds, the damned Russian Mafiya had no such compunctions, and were bug eating _crazy_ to boot. As in, "firing rocket launchers in the shopping mall," crazy.

They needed a handle on these guys. They had a name at least, that was a start, but that wasn't enough if they couldn't find out what this Volkov was up to, or where his base of operations was located. Once upon a time it would have been easy for Nick, he'd known everyone in town. But then he'd put on the uniform (god had he grinned, just like he'd been eight years old again, when he'd first seen himself in the mirror) and about half of his old acquaintances had suddenly found excuses not to talk to him. He didn't have any contacts left that might be any help.

_What's a matter with the crowd I'm seeing?_  
"Don't you know that you're out of touch?"  
Should I try to be a straight A student?  
"If you are then you think too much." 

Nick blinked. _Dumb fox_. Then he flipped the light on again and slapped the stop button on the cassette player, reaching over to where he'd left his mobile sitting on top of the room's little dresser. He brought up his contacts list and hit a certain number, praying he wouldn't get shunted to voice mail.

"What the hell do you want, Nick?" answered a gruff, and way too deep for its size, voice on the other end. "Decided to see what the poor brothers are up to, now that you're a fancy pants police officer?"

"Finnick, I'm sorry, but I haven't exactly had a helluva lot of free time recently," Nick replied.

"Yeah, because you got better things to do than help out your old friends," Finnick said, sounding pissed.

"I have been helping you, you just didn't know it."

"Since when?"

"Since I politely asked my fellow officers to turn a blind eye to a certain pint-sized fennec fox's activities, as he is so very _bad_ at trying to run scams without my help."

"Yeah, well up yours too. Waddaya want, Officer Fox?"

"You heard about my partner Judy, right?"

There was a brief pause at the other end. "Yeah, I'm sorry about that," Finnick said, a bit less gruffly. "She seemed nice, for a cop. That was rough what happened to her."

"Yeah, well, we got a lead on who might be holding the leash on the guy who hurt her. Fella named Volkov. Sound familiar at all?"

"The Russians? That's who tried to whack her?"

Nick's ears perked up. "You know him?"

"I've _heard_ of him. My momma didn't raise nobody stupid enough to try and run with the Russian Mafiya. Those muthas are _crazy_ , Nick."

"Don't I know it. That's why we need to find them. There's gonna be a big rumble between Volkov and Mr. Big's boys over this, unless we can find that Russian _fast_. I need a handle, Finnick, _any_ kind of handle, so we can haul this guy in before things get out of control."

There was a longer pause. "I might know a guy. I ain't saying I _do_ know a guy, but I might know somebody who might know somebody."

Nick blew out his breath. "Do you think you could find him, fast?"

"He hangs out at this dive by the docks. Y'know the bar built into that old aircraft hangar?"

"Yeah, I know it. They built it back in the 30's, when there was a seaplane service going between Zootopia and Cape Suzette. Think you could point him out to me if we went in there?"

"If he's there, sure."

Nick sagged in relief. "Thanks, Finnick. Bring your van around to my apartment, and make sure you grab a triple expresso for me along the way."

"You better have money to pay for it, and cover my gas."

"You know I'm good for it." Nick hung up the phone and started stripping out of his police uniform and into his familiar slacks and Hawaiian shirt. He paused as he was slipping his tie on, looking down at the badge gleaming on the breast of his uniform blouse. If Chief Bogo found out he was involving himself in the investigation after being specifically ordered not to, Nick would be handing that badge over to him in a few days. _Carrots would not thank me for that, if she lives through this._

Well, if she didn't live through it, it wouldn't matter, he reasoned. If she did live through this though, he'd rather lose his badge than risk the Russians getting another shot at her.

"You're just looking for justifications," Nick told his reflection in the mirror. Then he shrugged. "Or maybe you were just a sneaky fox all along."

_Everybody's talking 'bout the new sound  
Funny, but it's still rock and roll to me._


	5. Missing Persons

Bonnie had fallen asleep, cuddled with Stu on the padded lounge chair one of the nurses had dragged into the hospital room for them. When she awoke the room lights had been dimmed down, and she could see the sun had set, leaving only the light of the streetlights outside. Someone had tossed a blanket over them both, and she found herself not wanting to crawl out from under it just yet.

Glancing over to Judy, she could see that there was no change. She just laid there, the respirator making her chest rise and fall like a well pump. Watching it, Bonnie felt her nose twitch in agitation. The thought occurred to her that it not be Judy there anymore. Maybe it was just her body now, and they were simply biding time before giving into the inevitable and turning off the switch.

_No._ Judy had believed in being a police officer, had wanted it so hard that she made it happen, despite all the odds against her. _If she wouldn't give up on herself, I'm not going to either._

Bonnie slid out from under the blanket and padded over to her daughter's bedside. She stroked her paw gently along Judy's cheek, brushing her fur back in place. "Sweetheart," she whispered, "I know you must be hurting something awful right now, and if you want to go, your father and I will understand. But if you're willing fight and come back to us, I want you to fight _as hard you can_. You never, ever gave up, never stopped believing in yourself, and we never did either. Maybe we were terribly scared for you sometimes, but we never gave up. So come back to us. We'll be waiting right here for you."

She felt Stu's paw press into her back, and he leaned over to whisper, "What she said, Jude the Dude." Then he stood up straight, stretching and cracking his back. "Hon, we should find a hotel room and get some real sleep. They'll call us if anything changes, just like the doctor said."

"I guess you're right," Bonnie agreed reluctantly. She leaned over and kissed Judy's forehead. "We'll be back, sweetheart." Together they walked over to the door, opening it to find a new wolf officer on duty outside. "Hello officer," she greeted. "We're going to go find a hotel room. Chief Bogo said he'd provide an escort for us."

"Of course," the wolf said, stepping away from the wall. "I'll take you there."

Bonnie glanced back at the open door uncertainly. "Shouldn't you stay at your post?"

The wolf smiled amiably. "My relief just arrived. She's in the bathroom, should be out in a minute." He pulled out his radio. "Ivana, this Phil. I'm taking Mr. and Mrs. Hopps to their accommodations. You take care of Judy."

_Will do_ , the radio crackled. _10-4, good buddy._

_"10-4, good buddy"?_ Bonnie thought in bemusement. She hadn't heard that one since the 70's.

"All right, come with me." The wolf began herding them towards the elevator.

Clawhauser knew it was silly to come back to the hospital. It wasn't like there was anything to do after dropping off the flowers and donuts, and giving a little hello to Judy's parents. Still, he remained agitated. Judy being hurt had upset him so much he'd gone through a whole box of Lucky Chomps just thinking about it. Yes, being a cop was a dangerous job, he knew that. But someone hurting a little bunny like _Judy_ just wasn't right. So he decided to come back and check in on her and her parents. Maybe if they were ready to go to a hotel room he could act as their escort. It 'd been an awfully long time since he'd done anything like field work after all, and he'd felt so _useless_ just playing switchboard operator when Nick's original desperate call for help had come in.

He stepped out of the elevator and turned the corner, just in time to see Mr. and Mrs. Hopps walking down the hallway with a wolf officer he didn't recognize. Ah well, there were so many in the ZPD. "Hi, Miss Bonnie, hi Stu!" he greeted cheerfully. "You going to your hotel?"

"Yes, thank you," Bonnie said. "We'll be back in the morning."

"Okie-doke. I'm just going to look in on Judy and then head home I guess. Hope I see you again." The wolf officer, _Phil_ his nametag said, just nodded and guided the two bunnies into the elevator.

Turning the corner towards Judy's room, Clauhauser's eyebrows went up when he saw that there was no guard at her door. No, wait, there was another officer coming out of the bathroom, a female wolf with white fur and a frowning expression. "Who are you?" she asked, approaching him. Her accent sounded vaguely Slavic and her name tag said _Ivana_. Maybe she was from one of the Tundratown precincts.

"I'm Clawahuser, Precinct One. What were you doing?" he asked.

"Going to the bathroom," she said.

"The other officer should have waited until you were done before he left," Clauhauser admonished. "The way things are, Chief Bogo would write you both up for sure."

"Sorry," Ivana said, ducking her head. "I check on the little bunny now."

"Sure, I'll wait out here." Clauhauser watched her slip into the room, closing the door behind her. He waited outside uncomfortably for a moment, trying to figure out what was bothering him. It was something niggling at the back of his brain that had nothing to do with worrying about Judy. He scratched his head, trying to think, and then realized several things.

1.) He hadn't recognized either of the officers, and after years of manning his desk in the lobby, Clawhauser figured at this point he knew everyone at the station house. Not recognizing one officer he might put up to distraction, but he couldn't imagine he'd ever miss _two_.

2.) Leaving Judy's door unguarded, even for a minute, was seriously unprofessional. Chief Bogo would be having nice loud shout over that one. Risking the chief's wrath at a time like this would be something no officer would want to chance.

3) Their nametags had been wrong. _Phil_ and _Ivana?_ They should have displayed their first initial and their last name, just like his _B. Clawhauser_ or Nick's _N. Wilde_. _Phil_ and _Ivana_ were the tags you saw on a barista at Stardoes.

4\. The gun at Ivana's hip hadn't been a department issue Glock 21, but Beretta 92. For the life of him Clawhauser couldn't figure why she'd use a non-standard weapon. The only real difference between them was the Beretta could…

… use a silencer.

In all his years on the force, Clawhauser had never fired his pistol outside the practice range. In all his years he'd never figured he would, given his preference for desk work. But for all those years he'd dutifully kept up his range qualifications as required, so when he kicked in the door he had his pistol held in both paws, pointed right at the false officer as she turned in surprise, the silenced pistol in her paw.

"Drop you weapon!" Clawhauser shouted. Instead of obeying, the false officer chose instead to dodge backwards, raising her Berretta towards him. His pistol kicked twice in the cheetah's paws, roaring in the confined space, and the wolf dropped, landing hard on the tiled floor, two bloody holes in her chest.

He kicked the weapon out the dead wolf's paw, sending it skidding across the floor, turning to run past the nurse's station, shouting, "Secure that room!" Clawhauser slammed his shoulder against the door to the stairwell, jumping down them three steps at time towards the sky bridge level, while he yanked his radio out of his belt with his free paw and shouted, "This is Clawhauser! 10-20 Zootopia General! 10-32, two civilians disguised as police officers. One dead, the other with hostages, possible kidnapping in progress, officer in pursuit!"

He burst out of the stairwell, feet almost skidding out from under him as he turned and pelted across the lobby and onto the sky bridge, doctors, nurses and civilians gaping in his wake. Up ahead he could just see Mr. and Mrs. Hopps being helped into a black SUV by the false officer. At Clawhauser's wheezing shout he turned and snarled, jumping into the back with the two bunnies.

The SUV accelerated, zooming towards the exit. Clawhauser barreled down the parking garage's stairs, lungs burning, feeling every pound of fat slowing him down. _I'm a cheetah, I should be **faster** than this._ He made it down the second flight of stairs just in time to see the SUV roaring towards the exit. Clawhauser stood in the middle of the exit ramp, raising his pistol to fire again, trying to shoot out the truck's tires, only to have to dodge out of the way as the truck barreled towards him. He spun around as he was clipped in the shoulder by the SUV's passenger side mirror, catching a brief glimpse of the terrified faces of Mr. and Mrs. Hopps in the window as he fell.

Then he was landing on hands and knees, gasping, trying to catch his breath as he hyperventilated into his radio, watching as the truck turned onto the street. "Clawhauser… Black SUV… going north… Pride Avenue… partial license Delta… Victor… Romeo… Send... send units. They've got Judy's parents." He started sobbing uncontrollably. "They've got Judy's _parents_." 


	6. On the Scene

When Chief Bogo arrived at Zootopia General, it was already a scene of controlled chaos. Six police cruisers had the street in front of the hospital blocked off, and a team of forensics sloths were diligently placing numbered markers and snapping pictures in the parking garage, recording the evidence of each shot Clawhauser had fired at the vehicle.

Clawhauser himself was sitting on the curb, one arm in sling, the other holding an oxygen mask to his face and breathing deeply under the supervision of a tiger paramedic. He started to get up, but sat again when Bogo waved him down. The desk sergeant's face looked as bad, if not worse, than the time during the Night Howler crisis when Bogo had to transfer him off his beloved front desk and back down into Records.

"Report, Clawhauser," Bogo ordered. "What the hell happened?"

Clawhauser gulped, and then said, "I screwed up, Chief. The whole situation smelled wrong and I didn't see it until it was too late. Now they've got Mr. and Mrs. Hopps and…"

"Slow down," Bogo interrupted. "Start from the beginning."

The sergeant nodded, took another hit from the oxygen mask, then gave a reasonably coherent account of his encounter with the false police officers outside Hopps' hospital room, his growing suspicions, then his shooting of Hopps' would be assassin and his attempt to stop the other one from kidnapping the bunny officer's parents.

"Please tell me you found the SUV, _please_ Chief," Clawhauser pleaded.

Bogo nodded briefly. "Yes, we tracked it on the jam cams until it went into an underground parking garage a quarter-mile from here. There are three separate service tunnels running out the building the garage serviced. We think the suspect and his accomplice driving the SUV took Officer Hopps' parents down one of them and then transferred them to another vehicle."

"Oh," Clawhauser said softly. "Oh, Chief, I'm so _sorry_..."

Bogo held up a hand. "Stop right there, Clawhauser. You have nothing to apologize for. You were off duty; you weren't even supposed to be here. If you hadn't shown up and intervened when you did, Judy would be dead and we'd have no idea what happened to her parents. If anyone is to blame for this it's Wolfowitz for accepting the false officers without question, instead of catching the anomalies you saw. You did good."

Clawhauser nodded and rubbed his eyes with the back of his paw. "Thank you, Chief."

"Now, we both know you should be on administrative leave after being involved in a shooting incident, but I have to ask, would you be willing to man your desk back at the station for a bit? You're the most experienced dispatcher we have, and I’d like to have you there to help coordinate the search for Hopps' parents. Think you can do it with a bum shoulder?"

Clawhauser pushed himself awkwardly to his feet, and gave Chief Bogo a left handed salute. "Yessir! I'll go there right now."

"Good." Bogo motioned to one of the officers guarding the perimeter from the crowd of curious civilians that were gathering at the outskirts. "Get Clawhauser back to the station, and stand by for further instructions." That taken care of, he headed inside, riding the elevator up to the Small Mammals ICU. More cops and forensics sloths crowded the area, the body of the white wolf lying in a body bag in Hopps' room, ready to be zipped up and taken to the morgue for closer examination. "Where is Officer Hopps?" he asked a gazelle nurse hovering nearby.

"We moved her to the end of the hallway," she said. "Dr. Weismouser is with her now.

"Thank you." Bogo headed down to a room at the end of the hallway, where an agitated team of hamsters and mice were gathered around a workstation mounted on the wall shelf, looking over data as Judy lay on her bed, still unconscious. "Excuse me, Dr. Weismouser?"

One of doctors turned towards him, looking irritated. "That's me. Forgive me, but we're discussing this patient's care. Please leave; otherwise we'd be violating federal HIPPO regulations."

"I'm Chief Bogo of the ZPD. I just wanted to make sure Officer Hopps is stable enough to be moved."

"Move? Move where?"

"I was considering the infirmary of the Zootopia Correctional Institute. It's the most secure medical facility available."

Weismouser shook his head. "Out of the question. Given Officer Hopps' current condition, moving her would be extremely hazardous, especially to a facility without a dedicated ICU. She has to stay here."

Bogo growled. "Doctor, I don't have enough officers to spare to secure this wing. You are aware that we're now also trying to find her parent's kidnappers as well, yes?"

"I understand your concerns, but she cannot be moved right now," Weismouser insisted.

He opened his mouth to argue further, but was interrupted by an urgent tone from his radio. "Bogo here," he snapped. "What's the situation?"

"Sir, it's Francine. There's, um, a _concerned citizen_ down in lobby. He wants to talk to you."

Bogo growled. "Tell them they can wait. I'm busy up here."

"I think you _really_ want to talk to him, Chief."

He paused a moment, trying to read meaning into her strained tone. Finally he said, "I'm on my way."

When Bogo got down to the lobby, he found a line of six of his officers, staring across the lobby at an equal number of polar bears, dressing in a mix stylish conservative Italian jackets and dark tracksuits with gold chains. He found himself grimacing as he approach the lead bear, who held out his meaty hand palm up, a familiar looking shrew standing on it.

"Chief Bogo," Mr Big greeted.

"Mr. Big," Bogo returned neutrally. "You're a bit outside your territory. This isn't Little Rodentia, or Tundratown."

The little arctic shrew spread out his hands. "I could not stay in my house, not when my boys told me what they had heard over their police scanner. First Officer Judy is hurt so terribly, now this Volkov tries to kill her, and also takes her parents. What are you doing about this, Chief Bogo?"

"Finding Volkov and Officer Hopps' parents are my two main priorities right now, Mr. Big. So I would like to remind you that you are _delaying_ me in that task. Time of the essence, the more of it I waste talking to you, the more likely it is that they are going to be found dead at the bottom of a wheelie bin."

"I do not think that is this Volkov's plan, at least not yet," Mr Big said, shaking his head. "When he hurt Officer Judy, I thought to myself, this is just one of his boys taking advantage of an opportunity. But now he sends disguised wolves to kill her, take her parents. I think this Volkov is very much trying to make it personal. Volkov is a Russian for wolf. I think this wolf wishes to be leader of this city."

"Asserting dominance," Bogo concluded, brow wrinkling as he considered the logic of the shrew's conclusion, and not liking the taste of it.

"Yes, you see as I see it. How is it they say in some countries? Counting coup. To be powerful, he must demonstrate his power. Hurting my grandchildrens' godmother, kidnapping her parents, that shows he had power over what I value. And it hurts you, hurts Zootopia as well, to see their hero bunny hurt so."

Bogo's eyebrows drew down. "Wait, he wants to show his power over Zootopia as well. She's not our only hero."

"Yes, think of the other, who I have sup at my table, and who helped Zootopia's hero bunny stop the Night Howlers from poisoning our city."

He yanked his mobile out of his pocket, and autodialed Wilde's number. When the line picked up, Bogo could hear the thumping of loud, heavy music in the background.

"This is Nick," Wilde said. "What's up Chief? Anything change with Judy?"

"Wilde, where are you? Are you at home?"

"I cannot tell a lie, Chief," Wilde replied. "I couldn't sleep, so one of my buddies took me out to this dive of a bar he knows."

"I need you to come to the station right now."

Wilde's voice sounded puzzled. "I thought you wanted me to rest."

"Two of Volkov's thugs just tried to assassinate Hopps at the hospital. They missed and one of them is dead, but the other got away and also kidnapped her parents. I need you to get back to the station where it's safe. I think Volkov is targeting allies and friends of Mr. Big, and respected Zootopia citizens to actually provoke him into a gang war, to assert his own dominance over the city."

"Wait, what do you mean they got her _parents_?" Wilde exclaimed.

"You heard me. We're putting everything we can into finding them, but I need you where I know you're safe. Get back to the station, that's an order."

There was a long hesitation on the line. "I'll be there as soon as I can," Wilde replied. "Just gotta take care of one or two things first."

" _Wilde_..." Bogo started to growl.

" _Caio!_ " The line went dead. When Bogo tried it again, he immediately got shunted to Wilde's voice mail.

"If he isn't back at the station in a half hour, I'm gonna have him up on charges," Bogo growled.

"In the meantime, Chief Bogo, may I make a suggestion?" Mr. Big asked. "Your boys concentrate on finding this Volkov. My boys will stay here to guard Officer Judy. They will not let any more wolves come near here."

"That... would be appreciated," Bogo agreed reluctantly. "Thank you."

"I would do anything for family."


	7. Undercover

Nick getting into the bar was easy. _Finnick_ getting into the bar involved flashing three photo ID's and a loud announcement that he'd kick the bouncer's ass if he was carded one more time.

"I _hate_ being taken for a kit," the little fox muttered when they finally got through the door.

"Yeah, I can understand that," Nick agreed cheerfully, the triple espresso he'd drank being enough revive him for at least the next hour or so. "By the way, you still wearing your elephant onesie when you sleep?"

Finnick glared at him. "You try finding adult pajamas when you're this damn small." Then he added reluctantly, "Besides, it's comfy."

They stepped out of the lobby and into the bar proper. It was an enormous space, big enough to provide dry dock service for up to two of the old Boeing 314 Clippers back in the first half of the 20th century. A long bar ran along the right hand wall, leading to a series of tiered tables for patrons as low as a shrew and high as giraffe along the back side of the building. The entire wall facing Zootopia's ring shaped bay was made of glass, giving a spectacular view out onto the water and the mountains beyond. Finally in the center of the room was the dance floor, currently filled with the mid-evening crowd, a three foot wide, ten foot tall pillar in the center holding a quartet of female mice, dancing energetically, chrome electronic sensors at their wrists and ankles providing cues to a thumping electronic beat as they moved, their dance projected on large screens scattered throughout the room.

"You see the guy?" Nick asked, slipping on a pair Ray Bans to shield his eyes from the dance floor's flashing lights.

"I can't see shit down here. Grab a table so I can get high enough to look around," Finnick said, dodging the other bar patrons as they skirted the dance floor, heading towards the back tables. After a minute Nick grabbed a fox sized table a couple was vacating, picking up Finnick to plop him on top of it. "Ah, man! They haven't cleaned this yet!" Finnick yelped, stepping carefully around spots of spilled beer before finding a clean spot to sit.

"I'm gonna get drinks for us. What's your pleasure?" Nick asked.

"Banana daiquiri," the smaller fox told him.

Nick grinned at him. "You're really not helping your tough guy image with orders like that."

"I drink what I like. Just get the damn booze while I look around."

Nick left him and threaded around the crowd to the bar. He managed to flag down a bartender and put in Finnick's order, along with a rum and coke for himself. While he waited, he scanned the room, leaning back casually against the bar, trying to catch any threats that might be wandering around.

When his phone began vibrating in his pocket, he nearly dropped it in his rush to grab it. Chief Bogo's every scowling face showed up on the caller ID, and he felt a pit open up in his stomach. _Maybe she's awake_ , he thought desperately. _Maybe it's **good** news._ "This is Nick," he said into the phone. "What's up, Chief? Any change with Judy?"

"Wilde, where are you? Are you at home?"

"I cannot tell a lie, Chief. I couldn't sleep, so one of my buddies took me out to this dive bar he knows." Which was the absolute truth. It just left out a lot of annoying details, like _I'm working the case just like you told me not to._

 _ **Sly fox,**_ he snarled at himself.

"I need you to come to the station right now."

Puzzled, Nick asked, "I thought you wanted me to rest."

Bogo's voice sounded strained. "Two of Volkov's thugs just tried to assassinate Hopps at the hospital. They missed and one of them is dead, but the other got away and also kidnapped her parents. I need you to get back to the station where it's safe. I think Volkov is targeting allies and friends of Mr. Big, and respected Zootopia citizens, to actually provoke him into a gang war, to assert his own dominance over the city."

Nick felt his stomach lurch, and his tail frizz out in fear. "Wait, what do you mean they got her _parents_?" he demanded. God help him, he could see the assholes who tried to kill Judy making a second attempt on her. In his wildest nightmares he'd never anticipated her kindly farmer parents getting involved in the situation.

"You heard me. We're putting everything we can into finding them, but I need you where I know you're safe. Get back to the station, that's an order."

He was about to say yes, he honestly was, because he could _hear_ the fear for his officer that Bogo was trying to conceal over the line. He knew the chief needed to know he was safe, because Nick on loose and vulnerable was just another worry ZPD's chief of police didn't need in this crisis. But then he saw a familiar polar bear sitting alone at a table, a look on his face like he was waiting on someone, and they were late.

Nick hesitated a long moment, then answered, "I'll be there as soon as I can. Just gotta take care of one or two things first." _I'm not lying. I'm just not telling you everything,_ he thought, even as he cursed himself for stretching the truth like this.

" _Wilde_ ," the chief started to growl.

" _Caio!_ " Nick said with false cheer, then cut the connection and turned off his phone. He stepped away from the bar without waiting for the drinks, hurrying back as fast as he could while still looking casual.

"Where's the drinks?" Finnick demanded, when he got back to the table.

"Left 'em," Nick replied tightly. "I just got a call from Chief Bogo. Volkov's goons just made an attempt to kill Judy in the hospital, and they kidnapped her parents."

Finnick's big ears went flat against his head. " _Shit_. Watcha gonna do, Nick?"

"Look to your left, as casual as you can. Polar bear in a loud shirt and gold chains."

Finnick glanced over, turning his eyes back to Nick quickly. "I see 'em."

"That's the bastard that hurt, Judy," Nick growled.

" _Goddamn_. You callin' it in, Nick?"

He shook his head. "Not yet. They've got Judy's parents. I'm thinking Volkov is too damned violent to want to hold them for ransom. He's going to kill them, but do it in a way to achieve maximum provocation. It's gonna be pubic, it's gonna be messy, and it's gonna be _soon_. If I call Bogo he'll send armed patrollers, and that may just spook this guy before we can find where they're holding the Hoppses."

His friend's eyes were wide, his tough guy persona almost forgotten in his concern. "So whatcha gonna do?"

"Tail him right back to Volkov."

"Got it. Where do you need me in all this?"

Nick took hold of Finnick's shoulders, picking him up and setting him down on the floor. "You need to go home."

Finnick snarled. "The hell you say!"

He squatted down beside the small fennec fox. "Look, Finn. I've got exactly two friends in this world that I trust without thinking about it. One of them is in the hospital right now, and may never come out. The other is standing right in front of me. I need to know that you'll be all right."

"Yeah, well I got _one_ friend that I trust," Finnick shot back, "and he's about to do something majorly _stupid_. You think I'm gonna let him go off by himself?"

"Yes," Nick replied. "Face it, buddy, you're just too damned conspicuous. Now you head out of here. If I don't call you, _call_ , not text, in a half hour, call the ZPD and tell them everything that's going on."

Finnick looked like he was going to balk at this, but finally said, "You watch yo' ass then, Nick. Keep your piece handy."

"Didn't bring it," Nick answered. At Finnick's disbelieving look he added, "I couldn't bring it past the _bouncer_ , Finnick."

" _Shit_. Just watch yourself then."

"Will do. Now _go_." Finnick gave him another glare, then turned and headed towards the front door, dodging and cussing at the other bar patrons as he went. Nick waited until he was sure Finnick had made it to the lobby, then stepped away from the table and towards his quarry.

"Hi!" Nick said cheerfully, walking up to the polar bear. "My name is Officer Nick Wilde. You mauled my partner. Prepare to die."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, that's _Move to the Music_ providing the bar's entertainment. They appear with the permission of their creator, "Baroncoon".


	8. Under the Gun

The polar bear's paw shot out, grabbing Nick by the neck and lifting him up onto his toes. "Funny little fox," he growled. "Why should I not kill you right now?"

Nick let out a garbled cry, tapping his claw against one of the polar bear's fingers to indicate he needed air. "Bit public here, don't you think?" he gasped, as the bear loosened his grip. "I know your boss is all about pissing folks off enough to start a shooting war, but it'd be messy to begin it with one of his soldiers immediately getting arrested for murdering a guy in front of a hundred witnesses."

"Fine. I take you out to dock, and toss your body into water."

"No, you're going to keep me alive, for the moment at least." Nick waved his arms, trying to stretch his toes to get more air. "C'mon, Volkov wants to have some fun, am I right? Why else would he bother kidnapping Officer Hopps' parents, instead of just shooting them too? One of your guys got whacked trying to get to her. Betcha that's who you were waiting, wasn't it? You don't think Volkov would just _love_ having a chance to do that to the famous Officer Hopps' partner himself, after that?"

The polar bear glared at him, fingers flexing against Nick's aching neck. Then he lifted the fox officer up off the floor and set him on the edge of the table, shifting his grip to Nick's arm to keep him from escaping. With his other paw he dug into his pocket to pull out his mobile phone, engaging in a rapid fire conversation in Russian with a voice at the other end. When he hung up his phone, he looked at Nick sourly. "You lucky, fox. Volkov wishes to see you."

"And I want to see him. Everybody wins!" Nick said cheerily, rubbing his aching neck. The polar bear pulled him off the table and marched him out of the bar, where a black SUV was already waiting, the passenger door open. Nick was lifted up and shoved inside, the bear sitting beside him. He shut the door and pulled a black bag out from a pocket on the back of the driver's seat, flipping it over the fox's head. It smelled of sweat and fear, when Nick took a sniff. "Do you ever wash this?" he asked, voice muffled.

"Be shutting up now," the polar bear order, giving a whack across the back of Nick's head to emphasize the point, which left the fox with stars dancing in front of his eyes briefly.

The drive took twenty or thirty minutes, Nick estimated, though it was hard to keep track while he fought to breathe in the confines of the bag. No telling where they were going. From the way the SUV shifted and turned, Nick guessed the driver was trying to keep any tails from following them. _Hell, we may just be heading back to the docks._ Eventually he felt the SUV go down a steep ramp and into a structure. There was a clang of a steel door rolling shut behind them, and then the engine stopped and he was pulled out.

The polar bear pulled the bag off of Nick's head and he looked around. It was obviously an industrial garage of some sort, where trucks as large as 18 wheelers could drive down into and be offloaded in security. Looking around he spotted a couple more black SUV's, and a half-dozen anonymous, unmarked white panel trucks that practically screamed _I am hauling illegal goods,_ to a cop's, or a sly fox's, view of the world.

_It's been thirty minutes, or close to it,_ Nick thought to himself, as the Russian bear dragged him towards a freight elevator. Finnick, if he did as Nick had asked, would be calling Chief Bogo soon. They hadn't grabbed Nick's phone out of his pocket either, not that he was able to call anyone at the moment. Whether it was an oversight on the bear's part, or arrogance on his boss's, Nick prayed it wouldn't be corrected.

The freight elevator moved down, to a third level subbasement, deep enough that Nick felt his ears pop. The doors slid open, and he was ushered into a large concrete room, piled high with wooden crates marked in English and Cyrillic lettering, the overhead florescent lights not quite enough to dispel the shadows around the room. In his pocket, Nick felt his phone give a double warning buzz, letting him know he'd lost contact with the nearest cell tower. _So much for calling for help,_ he thought.

At the back of the room was… well, a throne for lack of a better term. A chair was sitting on a dais made of a couple of wooden ballets and a large box, the whole thing partially covered with a blood red silk sheet. Nick felt himself let out a loud gasp of relief as he saw sitting in one corner of the dais a lockable wire and steel hutch, of the sort used by the ZPD to transport small mammal criminals. Sitting uncomfortably in it were Stu and Bonnie, who looked up at Nick with a mixture of hope and terror, their arms wrapped around each other for support.

"Hey, guys. Fancy meeting you here," Nick said, grinning in his best _I know exactly what I'm doing_ expression, even if he didn't. "How you been?"

"No talking!" the polar bear said, cuffing Nick again.

"Would you _please_ stop doing that?" Nick asked, rubbing his head.

"We're okay, Nick," Stu said from the cage. "Is Judy all right?"

"Yeah, they tried to kill her in the hospital, but Chief Bogo says they stopped the assassin." Nick turned to wave a claw at the polar bear in warning, who had his paw raised again to strike. "And if you hit me again, I'm gonna bite your finger off."

"Yuri, leave the nice officer alone," a female voiced called from a dark corner of the room. Nick turned again in time to see three figures emerging from a steel door to the right of the throne. Two wolves, with white coats of fur under dark leather jackets, flanked a much smaller figure. Nick's eyes popped open when he got a look at her. "There is no need to be rude to our guest."

She was a vixen, a fox with bright white fur and ice blue eyes, perhaps a couple inches shorter than Nick. She wore a red silk dress, over which she wore a furry red coat made out of… _Oh, dear God…_ fox tails. The vixen smiled, baring bright white teeth, settling herself atop her throne, looking down at Nick with an expression of hungry delight. "How do you do, Officer Wilde? Welcome, I am Volkov."


	9. Under Pressure

"Hi Volkov, I'm Nick," he replied, switching gears from utter terror to well-honed glibness, mouth operating on automatic pilot while he tried to figure out what to do next. "Sorry if I'm looking surprised. It's just with a name like yours I was expecting a wolf, not to mention a guy. I don't know much Russian, but wouldn't the feminine version of Volkov be 'Volkova'?"

"Yes, and it is usually a wolf's name," she said, looking amused. "But, as the bumper sticker says, in Zootopia anyone can be anything. Here I am a wolf, a hunter, like in the old days when prey were a food source, not a bunch of nasty, clever creatures with horns and spears. " Her fingers stroked the fur of woven tails draping her shoulders. "Do you like my coat?"

"Can't take my eyes off it," Nick admitted with complete honesty.

"I made from the tails of a rival organization in Moscow. They thought they could negotiate a truce, work together with me." She bared her fangs. "I killed them all. After that, no one negotiated with me, they simply _did_ as they were _told_."

"Wow," Nick said after a moment. "I knew you had to have a pair of brass ones, what with popping into the city and deliberately ticking off Mr. Big by going after Judy, but it turns out you're actually bugfuck _crazy_."

"Do you think so?" Volkov asked, raising an eyebrow. "Mr. Big is old, and lazy. He rules Little Rodentia and believes himself to be the sole power there, just because the police don't have officers small enough to patrol it. I will crush him, and _eat_ him, after I show him just how _small_ and _helpless_ he truly is!" She gestured to the two wolves. "Secure him!"

One of the wolves dragged a chair out from a corner, and Volkov's polar bear goon pushed Nick down onto it, holding him there as his arms were wrenched around the chair's back and cuffed tight. "Ow! Not on the first date!" he chided. _She must want to talk_ , he thought. If she'd spent her entire time in Zootopia stuck in this nice, secure bunker, she had to have been going out of her mind (well _more_ out her mind) with boredom just talking to her minions. _She wants an audience to show off how great she is._

"If we were dating, I'd be leaving marks deeper than a few bruises on your wrists," Volkov said with a grin.

"Yeah, I'll bet," he agreed. _Gotta keep her monologing_ , Nick thought. The longer she talked, the better chance he had to figure out a way out of this. "So what brings you here, anyway? If you were so on top of things back in Mother Russia, why bother moving your operations? Heck, given the politics over there, you might have actually qualified as legit if you'd stayed."

"Ignoring that insult to my homeland, my main difficulty was access to resources," she answered. "Spring and summer are too short there to support production of what I needed, even supplemented by hydroponics."

"What you needed?" Nick asked. The hairs rose on the ruff of his neck, as he realized what she was talking about. _It's not possible. All the remaining samples were destroyed after Bellwether's trial._

Volkov opened one of the crates, pulling out a smaller plastic container. Flipping the top up, she extracted a small ball the size of a blueberry, though the color was much lighter, the shade of the sky on a clear day.

"That is not what you think it is," Nick said, his voice almost trembling in relief. "Real Night Howler rounds are dark blue. Somebody gave you a line about the formula you bought from them."

"Oh, the formula was quite legitimate. One of my hackers pulled it out of the Zootopia District Attorney's own files," she replied. Volkov tossed the bright blue paintball round in the palm of her paw. "This is a… variation… you could say. Your Mayor Bellwether was short-sighted in her ambitions. A drug like Night Howler would be _so_ profitable, in the right circumstances."

She motioned to one of the wolves, who pulled out an air pistol from under his jacket and handed to her. At another gesture, the wolf stepped forward and pulled open Nick's shirt. Then Volkov loaded the round into the pistol, raised it, and fired the round directly at Nick's exposed chest.

Nick flinched at the sting of the round, remembering when Bellwether had fired a dose of what she'd though was pure Night Howler poison into him. It had been a moment of sheer terror, as he'd thought _What if we got wrong? What if she saw it was just a blueberry and replaced it with a real round?_ He closed his eyes and tried to breathe, waiting for the red haze of anger to settle over him like the Night Howler victims had reported, the unstoppable rage to lash out at a world that no longer made sense. After a few moments he opened them, a slow smile rising to his face.

"Hey, whaddya you know? It didn't work," he said, giving Volkov a shrug. "Like I said, it's the wrong color."

A _moue_ of disappointment crossed Volkov's face. "So it would seem," she said, shrugging herself. "Perhaps the formula does need some tweaking. I shall have to discuss the matter with my chemists." She spoke to polar bear in Russian, and he reached into the pocket of his pants and tossed a set of keys onto the floor. "I think I will leave you and your bunny friends for now. You are free to go."

Nick's ears cocked up in surprise. "You serious?"

Volkov smiled again. "Of course. I will admit I was looking forward to watching you tear those little prey apart, but it seems I will have to wait for that pleasure. I will let you go, with the knowledge that I _could_ have you all killed at any time. Let's see how well you sleep after that." With that she snapped her fingers at her goons, and they all walked together out the door she'd entered. The clang of metal as it shut echoed throughout the room.

"Well, that was anti-climactic," Nick said to Bonnie and Stu, after a moment.

"Fine by me," Stu said. "You sure you're all right, Nick?"

"I think so. I don't _feel_ any different," he replied. Well, a bit hungry, but that was likely because the only thing he'd eaten in over a day was one tasteless fish patty. Nick leaned forward, balancing uncertainly as he got to his feet. His paws had been cuffed behind the back of the chair, but the handcuff chain hadn't been wrapped around the rails of the chair back, so it was simple to slip free. A few more moments of maneuvering and he managed to slip his legs though the loop of his arms, bringing his paws in front of himself. Then it was a simple matter of grabbing the handcuff keys off the floor, working a key somewhat awkwardly into the keyhole of the left cuff, and giving it a turn. It opened easily, and soon he had the right free as well. He tossed both key and cuffs to the floor, kneeling down in front of Bonnie and Stu's kennel.

"You guys sure you're okay?" he asked, swallowing back the nervous spit that was filling his mouth. There were two latches keeping the kennel door shut, but no padlocks had been put in place to secure them. With the interior of the kennel lined with wire behind the bars, it would have been impossible for Judy's parents to free themselves.

"We're fine, Nick. Just got got tossed around and growled at by that crazy fox and her wolves," Bonnie assured him. "Let's get out of here before she changes her mind and comes back."

"Sure," Nick said. He unlatched the cage and let the two prey animals out. They stood up, noses twitching in distress, holding each others paws. Tiny things, no larger than Judy. So very small, barely a meal back in the bad old days. "Hey, what's wrong?" he asked, running his tongue over his fangs briefly.

"You sure sure you're all right, Nick?" Stu asked, straightening his cap on his head. "Your eyes look all funny."

"I'm fine," Nick said sharply. "Never felt better." He felt his lips pull back from his fangs in a vulpine grin. "I'm just _really_ hungry."


	10. Underworld

The two prey both backed up a step, ears drooped down and noses twitching hard, looking up at him in fear. He could _smell_ their fear, even with three feet separating them. Everything around him seemed so much sharper, clearer, and simpler. There was a hunger deep in his belly, and prey in front of him, problem and solution all neatly together.

"You say you're hungry?" the male said nervously, patting the front of his overalls. "I think I got a candy carrot in my pocket somewhere for you."

"Stu, that won't help," the female said irritably. She took a step forward. "Nick, this isn't funny. You're scaring us."

"So?" he breathed.

_I, Nicholas Wilde…_

"That isn't you talking," the prey went on, "it's that nasty Night Howler drug that crazy vixen hit you with."

… _promise to be brave, loyal…_

"Stop talking," he said, either to the prey or the voice niggling in the back of his head, he couldn't be sure. "I'm hungry. Food doesn't talk."

_...helpful, and trustworthy!_

"That's right," the prey said. "You know the First Rule as well as we do; If It Talks, It is Not Food."

"So… stop… _talking!_ " he roared, charging. The two prey leaped away, splitting up to either side of the room. He skidded across a dried oil stain on the floor, fetching up against the makeshift dais. "Come back here!" He turned and headed to the right, where the male had scampered off into the shadows of the piled boxes. No matter, to his eyes it was as bright as a cloudy dawn, while the prey would be nearly blind.

_I, Officer Nicholas Wilde…_

"Where _arrrrrrre_ you?" he called out, dropping to all fours to creep around the corner of a crate pile. No sign of them… yet.

… _upon my honor…_

"Shut _up,_ " he growled _._

… _swear to uphold the laws of Zootopia…_

A shadow of movement from above. He glanced up, to see the male hopping along the top of a pile of crates. He leaped, claws trying to find purchase in the rough pinewood, scrabbling up, growling in frustration as the prey leaped to another pile, deeper into the shadows.

… _to act with bravery, and with integrity._

"Stop _running_."

… _and to always uphold the public trust._

He leaped in pursuit of the male prey, claws scrambling for a hold on a wooden crate as he struck the side of the next pile, rolling into a ball as he fell to the concrete instead, arms clutched around his head.

" _Nrgh,_ what's wrong with me?" Nick howled. "What did you _do_ to me?"

Volkov's voice came over some hidden speaker in the ceiling. "I've opened your eyes, Nick. Night Hunter is an improvement upon Night Howler. Instead of dropping its victim into snarling madness, it merely helps strip away all the useless inhibitions we predators are forced to adopt to fit into _civilized_ society. Isn't it wonderful?"

"You're not a crook," he panted, kneeling on all fours, head pounding. "You're a pred supremacist!"

"This is Zootopia, Nick. Why can't I be both?" Volkov purred. "Predators were at the top of the food chain, before Prey developed technology like spears, the bow and arrow, and the gun. So we made the Great Compromise with them, promised not to hunt and eat them. We were reduced to eating plants and fish to sustain ourselves, giving up our heritage for the sake of peace. Night Hunter erases millennia of developed self-control in mere minutes, allowing us to return to a life that we abandoned for mere _Civilization._ "

"You're _crazy!_ "

"Is it crazy to believe that the strong should rule over the weak? To believe we should be permitted to take what we deserve? _Eat_ what we deserve? Tell me, _officer_ , have you ever tasted meat, _real_ meat, in your entire life?"

"Of course not!" He raised his head, sniffing the air. The prey was near, he knew it was. He could feel himself being torn in two, one part of him so _hungry,_ wanting to taste fur in his mouth again, like when he'd been _so close_ to consuming Carrots, his teeth at her throat, just a few more ounces of pressure…

"Red meat, Officer Wilde. I have tasted it, felt the hot blood of my enemies in my mouth, _gorged_ upon it. You have so much to look forward to!"

" _Stop talking._ "

There! There was the female, right out in the open, at the intersection of two corridors made with the piles of crates. Her nose twitched, looking around blindly, unable to see him in the dark room. He dropped down to his haunches again, tail waving in anticipation. Then he sprang towards her, mouth agape, ready to bite and tear open the meal that was rightfully his!

The female suddenly jumped straight up in the air as he landed almost atop her, missing hhis prey by mere inches. Then he was struck by a hard blow on the side of his head, as the male leaped feet first from the side corridor. Stars flashed in front of his eyes, then the female came right back down, landing between his ears, and everything went black.


	11. Under Control

"Nick? You still with us, Nick?"

He folded his ears back, muffling the sound. He and Finnick must have really scored on whatever yesterday's hustle was, his head was absolutely pounding from the aftereffects of the celebration. Well, it was too early to start dealing with the morning after just yet. What was the point of being an independent business entrepreneur if you couldn't set your own hours? _Go away, world._

"Nick, wake up now. We can't do all of this by ourselves." The voice was female, insistent, and familiar.

He groaned. "It's _Saturday_ , Mom." He had lived for Saturdays. School had bored him. The teachers had always wanted him to learn things about history, and mathematics, not anything _useful_. Then after the muzzling incident when he'd tried to join the Junior Ranger Scouts he'd dreaded each school day, fearing to meet the scouts in the eye.

"I'm not your mother, and its Wednesday anyway, Nick. Now wake up!"

Nick opened his eyes reluctantly, and then quickly closed them again as a light shined in his face. He squinted. Stu had taken Nick's phone and set it on flashlight mode, shining it in his face, while Bonne crouched beside her husband. All three of them were in a narrow, slimy drain pipe, barely wider than Nick's shoulders. He was lying on his stomach, arms twisted uncomfortably behind him, and a few quick tugs confirmed that he was back in the handcuffs. Someone had removed his tie and looped it under his shoulders in a makeshift harness, evidentially the way Bonnie and Stu had dragged him in here. _Strong farmer bunnies,_ he figured. "I'm awake," he said softly, head still pounding. "Where are we?"

"Floor drain, underneath the warehouse. We managed to drag you in here before that crazy vixen and her wolves charged in, once they figured out we'd knocked you out," Stu whispered. "Are ya yourself, Nick?"

Nick took a few moments to consider that one. "I'm… kinda of two minds at the moment," he admitted. "I'm looking at you, and I know you're Stu and Bonnie, one of my best friend's parents. But I'm also looking at you, and part of me is saying I'm really hungry, and that lunch is right in front of me."

Bonnie's nose twitched. "I think we'd better keep the cuffs on him, Stu."

"I… think that's a good idea," Nick agreed reluctantly. "Any way out of here?"

"Can't go up," Stu said. "We can hear 'em up in the warehouse. I think they're moving all those crates we saw earlier. There's the sound of water from up ahead though."

"This pipe probably leads to the municipal drainage system then," Nick guessed. "If we can make it there, we should be able to crawl along until we find a street grate, and we can either crawl out or yell for help."

"That sounds good," Bonnie agreed. "Come on, Stu, help me with Nick." The two bunnies grabbed the free end of Nick's tie and started pulling the fox along, careful to keep out of range of his jaws. Nick was able help push himself by digging his toe claws in the rough, rusty surface of the pipe's interior and shoving forward, careful not to let himself get too close to the Hopps. The nagging part of his brain that still insisted they were a food source was hard to ignore. He had the horrible suspicion that if he hadn't known the two bunnies personally, then the instinct to pursue and eat them would have been a lot harder to fight.

"Almost there, hun-bun!" Stu said. The sound of rushing water grew louder, and they finally came to the end of the pipe, which opened up into a larger drain about a yard in diameter. "Just gotta give Nick here one last tug!"

" _Wait!_ " Nick called out, as they dug their paw pads into edge of the pipe and got ready to heave. He worried his lip between his fangs briefly. "I think…" Nick swallowed, suddenly out of breath. "I think, before you pull me out to where there's more room, you'd better take my tie and…" Suddenly his throat went tight, forcing him to push the words past his teeth, "…and you'd better muzzle me."

"Oh, Nick! We can't do that to you!" Bonnie cried out.

"Sure can't!" Stu agreed. "We'd never be able to look you or Judy in the face again."

Nick shook his head. "I'm not eight anymore, and you've already seen how dangerous I am. I wouldn't be able to look at Judy either, if I had to tell her I ate her parents."

"Nicholas Wilde, we are _not_ doing that to you, and that's final," Bonnie said firmly, and how a two foot tall bunny could sound _just_ his mom was something Nick would never know.

He almost said "Your funeral" but was fortunately interrupted when a strong smell starting wafting down the pipe from the direction they'd came. Nick sniffed, and then started frantically pushing his toes against the walls of the pipe, trying to force his shoulders through. "Gasoline! They're pouring _gasoline_ down the drain! Get out of here!" A wave of pungent liquid fuel washed over him, soaking his clothes and fur, pouring out of the drain and over Bonnie and Stu's feet as they grabbed hold his tie once again.

" _Pull_ , Stuart!" Bonnie shouted. Together two heaved, falling into the larger drain pipe as Nick popped out.

"Grab onto me!" Nick shouted. The two bunnies grabbed the remains of his shirt, and he pinned them tightly between his body and his arms, as he dived under the filthy water, just as a wave of fire and heat went down the pipe and lit everything above the water in a massive fireball.

Nick kicked and swam with current, lungs burning as he tried to put distance between themselves and the fuel-air explosion. Finally, when he couldn't hold his breath any longer, he kicked up and burst to the surface, panting and coughing as he breathed in smoke and fumes, Judy's parents still hanging on for dear life.

"You guys alright?" he gasped. The two bunnies hopped up onto a little ledge, as they were pulled by the current into a cross junction under a ladder leading to an iron mammalhole cover.

"We're okay," Bonnie gasped, flopping down beside her husband.

"Don't think we needed that muzzle there, Nick," Stu noted, pushing himself up and gathering Bonnie in his arms.

"Guess not," Nick agreed. "You still got my mobile?"

"Right here," Stu said, pulling it from the front pocket of his overalls, "but ain't it soaked?"

"Shouldn't be. After Carrots and I took that tumble off the dam last year, it seemed like a good idea to get a waterproof model." He nodded to Stu. "Call Chief Bogo and tell him that we're in…" He looked up and checked the reference number stamped on the underside of the cover. "…drainage junction #326827."

While Stu brought up Bogo's number, Bonnie looked at Nick in concern. "You think we can let you out of those cuffs now?" she asked.

Nick ran his tongue over his fangs, and then lowered his head. "No. I'm still hungry." He closed his eyes wearily, and waited for the sound of approaching sirens.


	12. Headaches

Chief Bogo liked to think of himself as a reasonable mammal. The world wasn't perfect, his officers weren't perfect, and he knew _he_ wasn't perfect. Nevertheless, he wished sometimes that the universe would kindly _quit_ throwing situations at him that made want to give up policing and take up a nice, quiet job selling luxury ceramics. Example number one at the moment was Officer Wilde, who instead of staying off duty as requested had proceeded to stick his nose into a critical investigation, leading to him sitting in a chair in Bogo's office dressed in just a pair of pants and a set of handcuffs and leg irons, and smelling like a lawnmower that had been dragged through a sewer.

"Wilde, do you any idea of the gravity of your situation?" he asked, voice rumbling in displeasure.

"About 9.8 meters per second squared?" Wilde answered, ears perked up in amusement. He blinked. "Jeez, Mrs. Coon would be proud of me for remembering that. Wish I'd held onto the Periodic Table as well, she made us memorize the whole darned thing in 9th grade."

"Wilde…" he growled in warning.

"Sorry, Chief." He shrugged. "Look, I know perfectly well my ass, as well as my badge, is grass right now. However I would like to point out that I did manage to save the lives of two civilians…"

"After almost _eating_ two civilians," Bogo interrupted.

"Well, there's that. But in the process of almost being eaten all three of us are able to give witness to Volkov's admission to aiding in the creation of a serious new drug threat in the city. By the way, were you able to track down the warehouse that we were being held in?"

"Yes, it was underneath a commercial building on the edge of the weather wall between Sahara Square and Tundra Town. The building itself is too unstable to investigate at the moment, since it just suffered a massive fire starting in the basement."

"Damn, she must have moved all of the crates out before she set fire to the building and almost us as well," Wilde said regretfully. "Not to mention torching any other evidence. Are you doing a search for other warehouses where she could move the stuff?"

"That's our priority at the moment." Bogo added reluctantly, "Mr. Big is already compiling a list of his properties in Tundra Town whose renters he can personally vouch for. That should cut down our search a bit."

"Great. Judy okay?"

"Her condition hasn't changed." Bogo then asked, "How's your condition?"

Wilde shrugged, rattling his chains. "Chief, I'm looking at you and part of my brain is telling me I see my boss. I'm also looking at you, and part of my brain is telling me you'd probably be too big for me to take down by myself, and I should have gone after those two bunnies when I had the chance."

Bogo crossed his arms over his chest, looking down at Wilde. "You're speaking very calmly for a homicidal maniac."

"I think it comes from being a hustler for so long," Wilde admitted. "I'm so used to spouting off one set of lines while intending to do something else, that being a little schizoid is second nature to me. That may be why, after I shook off the initial reaction, that I was able to keep it together enough not to attack Judy's parents." He swallowed, his usual glib expression suddenly disappearing, to be replaced by a look of utter terror. "I'm so afraid I'm going to mix it up, though."

"We won't let you hurt anyone, Nick," Bogo reassured him. "We've got a doctor on the way from Zootopia General with a dose of the Night Howler antidote. Hopefully it'll work."

The fox nodded, taking a deep breath to calm down. Then he made a very deliberate shake of his head. "Even if the Night Howler antidote works on me, that's not going to solve the problem. This Volkov, she's pred supremist. She doesn't want to just muscle in on the criminal action in Zootopia, she wants to throw us back to the stone age, like it was before the Great Compromise, predator hunting prey, predators eating _meat._

"Bellwether almost brought the city to rioting with just a couple of dozen infected predators. But this Night Hunter variant is _worse._ Night Howler, it made predators go savage, but at least you could _see_ that there was something wrong with the victims. With Hunter, it's like it shuts down all the morality and empathy in a predator. They could be acting perfectly reasonably on the outside, while figuring out when was the best moment to strike and get a meal, and Volkov has _cases_ of that shit! Four goons with air pistols and plenty of ammo could make Zootopia go down in flames." He took in another breath, trying to control his panting. "She said she was going to make a profit off it though. For the life of me I don't see how."

Bogo leaned against his desk. "A drug that allows someone to kill, and not care about the consequences? You know how many governments, evil or not, would pay money for something like to use on their enemies, or even their own soldiers? I can take a guess at a few who might be potential buyers."

"And she can use all of Zootopia as a product demonstration," Nick noted glumly. "Great."

"That's not happening," Bogo said firmly. At a knock at the door, he called out, "Come in!"

Clawhauser stuck his head in through the door. "Hi, Chief! Oh, hi Nick! I just wanted to let you know Dr. Madge is here with the Night Howler antidote."

"Good. Send her in."

Dr. Madge waddled in, a refrigerated valise underneath one arm. She took in Wilde, sitting half-naked and cuffed in his chair, and looked at Bogo questioningly. "I was told you had an officer who had been poisoned with Night Howler."

"That's me," Wilde said, and gave her a cheery wave with a cuffed paw.

"He doesn't look like a Night Howler victim," she said, her tone dubious.

"It's a variation of the original formula, we believe." Bogo gave the doctor a quick summary of Night Hunter's apparent effects, and added, "We need to see if the original Night Howler antidote will be effective on Night Hunter's victims. If not, we've got a serious problem."

Dr. Madge, who'd taken a cautious step back from Wilde while she listened, shook her head in doubt. "I can't engage in an experimental procedure with a patient who is unable to provide informed consent. We have no idea what the actual effects will be on his system."

"Doc, if you don't inject me with the antidote, I'm gonna be sitting strapped to a gurney like Hannibal Lemur the rest of my life," Wilde told her. "I promise I'll sign any consent form you like, assuming you'll trust me with a pen."

"Consider it covered under the Zootopia Emergency Powers Act," Bogo added. "Or, if that doesn't help, try comparing it to performing tests on fourteen mammals who couldn't even talk, never mind never bothering to tell their families that they were still alive."

Dr. Madge gave him a glare, then opened her case on a nearby table to extract a gleaming syringe. "All right," she said reluctantly. "Ready, Officer Wilde?"

"Sock it to me, doc," Wilde said, grinning, belying the tight, tense curl of his tail.

Dr. Madge pressed the needle of the syringe into Wilde's arm, pressed the plunger home, then quickly withdrew it.

"Feel any different yet?" Bogo asked.

Wilde shook his head. "Nothing," he admitted. "How long before I start worrying, doc?"

"We only injected the antidote into the Night Howler victims after they'd been sedated," she said. "It was far too dangerous to get that close to them with a needle otherwise. We only knew it had worked once the sedation wore off."

"Can't take that long. Night Howler was almost instantaneous. Be kinda unfair if the antidote... _Ohhhh._.."

Bogo cocked his head, watching as the tension that Wilde had only been half concealing suddenly fled from his body, his posture relaxing so quickly he nearly slid out of his seat. Then the fox gasped, leaning forward, shoulders beginning to shake as he started to hyperventilate.

"He's starting to go into seizures!" Dr. Madge said urgently. "Call 911!"

"No, no, no... I'm... okay," Wilde panted. "I... oh, god... I almost killed them!" He began to sob uncontrollably, tears soaking his face fur. "I almost killed them! I almost killed Judy's parents!"

"Wilde!" Bogo stepped forward, grabbing the fox by the shoulders. "Nick, look at me! Look... at... me..."

Still gulping back sobs, Wilde looked up at Bogo's face. "Sir, I'm sorry... I should have stayed h-home. I'm so suh-sorry..."

"If you had stayed home, we might not have found either of her parents in time, Nick. Yeah, you screwed up, but you still saved their lives. Remember that!"

"Okay... okay... I'm okay... I'm okay..." Nick gasped. His breathing slowed down, and he wiped his face with his cuffed paws. "I'll... I'll be all right, I think."

"Good." Bogo quickly uncuffed Wilde, and helped the fox to his feet. "You think you can make it to the locker room on your own?"

"Yeah."

"Then get yourself cleaned up and into your spare uniform," Bogo ordered.

"Yes, Chief." Wilde started to salute, realized he was very much out of uniform just at the moment, and put his paw back down. "You sure you want me on duty?"

"Don't make any mistake about this. I'm still furious with you, but we need every officer that's available until we can catch this Volkov, before she starts darting every predator in the city."

"Right," Wilde agreed. "And, Chief?"

"What?"

Wilde smiled slightly. "Thanks."


	13. Showers and Hugs

Clawhauser had been hopping, metaphorically at least, the past few hours. Coordinating the ZPD response with the Zootopia Fire Dept. as they fought the building fire in Sahara Square had been quite a job, never mind his regular dispatcher duties as he fielded calls from other officers on more routine matters. Life in the city wasn't coming to a halt, despite the emergency with that awful Volkov character. He been so busy it had taken him a while to realize he hadn't even eaten in the past hour.

Now with the fire out, and Nick and the Hoppses were safe, there was finally a bit of slack time, and he was able to flag down Fangmeyer and have her take over for a few minutes while he went to take care of necessities. Not to mention get a soda from the vending machine to wash down his next scheduled dose of painkiller for his aching shoulder.

When he slipped into the male locker room, he could hear one of the showers running, steaming up the room. He risked a peek, and saw Nick scrubbing himself vigorously with a washcloth, most of his pelt covered suds. Clawhauser was just debating on whether to say hello or not, when he realized there was something wrong. Nick was panting hard, as if after a long run, his paw pads had almost been rubbed raw, and he was shedding so much fur as he rubbed the cloth over himself that the drain was clogging.

"Nick… Hey, Nick, are you okay?" Clawhauser asked softly. The fox turned around, ears flaring crimson, eyes even redder from the soap. No, the cheetah realized, not from the soap. _He's crying._

"I'm... okay…," Nick gasped. "Still dirty… I can still smell…" He shook his head and started scrubbing again, then flung the cloth away and starting raking his arms with his claws.

" _Nick_ , stop that!" Clawhauser cried out. "You're going to hurt yourself!" He reached into the shower and grabbed Nick's right wrist with his paw, pulling the fox's sopping wet body out of the shower.

"You don't understand, I can still smell…" Nick's voice broke as he sobbed again, beating his free paw against Clawhauser's chest. "Let go of me, you chubby cheetah!"

"I'm not letting go until you've calmed down," Clawhauser said firmly. He guided Nick away from the shower and sat him down on the wooden bench running been the rows of lockers, dragging the fox along. He might have been fat, but his bulk was good at keeping people from running. Awkwardly, he bought his right arm's sling around Nick, pulling him into a hug. "Now what's wrong? What do you smell? Gasoline maybe? I heard about you having to swim away from that fire."

"Not… not gasoline…" Nick huffed into Clawhauser's shoulder. "Bonnie and Stu. I've still their scent in my nose and I can't _get it out._ " He held up two fingers less than an inch apart. "I was _this close_ to ripping their throats out! I _wanted_ to rip their throats out! God, what if Judy had woken up to find out what I'd done…"

Clawhouser wrapped his other arm around Nick, holding him tight as the little fox sobbed into his chest. "It's okay now," he cooed. "It's okay. They're fine. You're fine. Judy is going to be fine. We're gonna find that nasty Volkov and put her away before she can hurt anyone else, okay? Maybe she made you _want_ to hurt them, but you didn't, did you?"

"N-no," he admitted. "But I _wanted_ too."

"Hey, intent doesn't mean anything if it isn't followed by action. I'm pretty sure they taught us that at the police academy, right?"

"Y-yeah," Nick said, his breathing slowing down, thank goodness. Clawhauser eased his grip on him and guided him back to the shower, to rinse out the suds and run him under the ceiling blower until his fur was just damp instead of soaking. Then he helped Nick get dressed in his spare uniform, buttoning up his uniform blouse when the fox found his own paws still shaking.

"Are you going to be okay?" Clawhauser asked.

"Yeah, I will be, once this is all over," Nick said, still looking distressed. "It's just that I left my badge on my other uniform, back at my apartment,"

"I've got _just_ the solution!" Clawhauser declared. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a sticker roll, pulling a _ZPD Junior Officer_ sticker off the waxed paper strip and placing it neatly on Nick's right breast. "Tah dah! All fixed!"

Nick looked down, snorted once, then doubled over laughing. "Perfect!" he gasped. He wheezed a couple of times, then patted Clawhauser's own blouse, soaked from holding onto Nick. "Sorry I got your uniform wet though."

"Aw, it's okay," Clawhauser said cheerfully. "If you still feel bad about it, you can pay for dinner. I was thinking that once Judy is out of the hospital, maybe you two and Francine and I can have a double date together."

"Francine?" Nick asked, ears rising in confusion. "Wait, you're dating _Francine_?"

"Oh, sure! We've been together a couple of months now!" Clawhauser felt himself blush a little. "I know most people date within their species, but this _is_ Zootopia, after all."

"It's not her species, Clawhauser. I just thought with the Gazelle obsession and all the…" Nick pressed his knuckles to his cheeks and pushed them upward briefly, making a little _eeee_ sound. "… that you were, um…" At Clawhauser's blank expression he just shook his head. "Never mind. This _is_ Zootopia, just like you said."

"That's right," Clawhauser agreed. "So is it a date?"

"Sure," Nick said amiably, his earlier upset almost forgotten. "Heck, maybe if my old buddy Finnick is seeing someone, we can make a triple date."

"Finnick? Have I met him?" Clawhauser asked.

"Yeah, or at least you talked to him when he called for Chief Bogo earlier. He's a fennec fox, short as a kit, voice like the Chief if he was standing at the bottom of a well. I told him to call after a half hour, when I met Volkov's goon at that bar, just to alert ZPD to what was going on."

Clawhauser frowned in confusion. "Nick, I'll check the call log to be sure, but I don't think I've talked to anyone named Finnick tonight, especially with a voice like that."

"You haven't? But I told him to call…" Nick's expression turned to one of panic. "Oh, no! Where's my phone?"

"In the evidence locker, I think," Clawhauser said.

Nick skidded on his foot pads, running out of the locker room, Clawhauser on his heels. "I gotta find it! He was supposed to call! Shit, where is he?!"


	14. Finnick in a Fix

_Bzzt, bzzt, bzzt._

"Yo, this is Finnick. Leave a message. I might get back."

"Finnick, if you're still alive, pick up the goddamn phone!"

"Mind not yellin' in my ear? I'm kinda in a tight squeeze here."

"You always answer your mobile like you've got it set to voice mail?"

"Why not? Half the time it's some guy from New Delhi tryin' to tell me about this cruise I won anyway. Whassup, Nick?"

"Where are you? You were supposed to call Bogo a half hour after I left the bar."

"Yeah, well when I saw you gettin' stuffed into that SUV I figured a half hour might be about ten minutes after you got your sorry tail capped. So I followed it instead."

"So you're in your van. Okay, good."

"Didn't say that."

"Finnick. I have had a _really_ crappy night, morning, whatever the hell time it is. Please just tell me where you are."

"I'm hiding in a vent shaft in the most creepy ass hospital you ever seen in your life. Looks straight outta _Half-Lope 2: Episode One._ "

"Cliffside Asylum?"

"How'd you know that?"

"Lucky guess. What are you doing _there_?"

"Hiding from a bunch'a nutcase Russians is what I'm doing. Never seen so much white fur in one place my whole life."

"Finnick, focus please. _Why_ are you there?"

"Like I said, I followed that SUV you got put in. Got to this warehouse by the weather wall and y'all drove into this underground garage. I figured before I call the fuzz I'm gonna sneak around all ninja like to scope the place out."

"God, Finnick, why didn't you just _call_?"

"You wanna hear this story or not?"

" _Sigh._ Go on."

"So after about half hour, and I was _gonna_ call, so shut up about that, four of these white panel vans come outta the garage. Y'know, the kind that may as well have a bumper sticker that says, 'I'm hauling something I don't' wanna get pulled over for' on the back."

"Yeah, I know what you mean."

"And right as they come out, smoke starts pouring outta the garage. Now I figured if you went in there, and they just came out, that you and Judy's mom and pop are all just burned fur by now. So I ninja onto the back of the last truck just as it was leaving and hang on, figuring if I'm calling the fuzz I wanna know where they going so I can get a whole damn SWAT team to take these mutha's out!"

"Aww, Finnick. You do care!"

"Shut up. Anyway, we get to the Hospital of the Livin' Dead, and they had these big ass polar bear guards at a check point. Thought I gotten through without them spottin' me, but turned out they did, and they came after me firing these paintball rounds. Now I got hit with a couple, but it didn't do nuthin', so I used my elite ninja skills again and slipped through an outside vent. I've been crawling around in here ever since."

"Wait, you got hit by a round?"

"That's what I just said. You deaf _and_ stupid?"

"Finnick, listen to me very carefully. Have you run into any prey species _after_ you got hit?"

"Nope, and they better hope I don't. I'm hungry for somethin' that I can sink my teeth into, if ya know what I mean."

"Yeah, I do, Finnick. Just stay outta sight for now, okay?"

"Those Russians ain't gonna see this ninja. Sides, they're too busy lining up all those barrels."

"Wait, barrels? What barrels?"

"Buncha fifty gallon drums they been pullin' outta the trucks. They're just lining 'em all up on the bridge running from the edge of the river to the hospital."

"Oh, sh- Finnick, I gotta go! Stay out of sight!"


	15. Marshaling Forces

"You know why I moved from South Africa to Zootopia?" Bogo asked Wilde, who was standing beside the chief in front of the station house, as the rest of the precinct's officers finished coming together in ranked rows, helping each other fit themselves into hazardous chemicals gear hastily requisitioned from Zootopia General. The sky was growing red in the east, promise of the dawn to come. Bogo wondered if Zootopia would still be standing by the time it set again.

"Never thought to ask, Chief," Wilde answered, his own fox sized suit hanging half around his waist. Somehow he'd obtained a cup of Stardoes coffee in the chaos after announcing his friend's discovery of Volkov's location, though from the way his tail and ears were both drooping, the stuff wasn't having much effect.

"Because I got to thinking that there wasn't much difference between the police and the military back home," Bogo answered. "I don't _like_ the idea of police running around with assault rifles just to keep the peace. I don't _want_ to look at this city and see its citizens as the enemy. I wanted to be working in a place that could do _better_ than that."

"If we can get through this morning, maybe you still can," Wilde said.

Bogo grunted, and then turned his attention to his officers, now finally prepared. "Listen up!" he shouted, voice booming in his best parade ground shout. "We are dealing with a major terrorist threat now. Going by the information we've been provided, it looks like Volkov and her gang intend to dump liquid Night Hunter into the city's main water supply. If we do not stop her, every predator and possibly every prey who drinks from a tap this morning will be at each other's throats, and we will have no way of telling them apart from unaffected citizens until they choose to act on their impulses. We _must_ stop Volkov before that happens.

"We will proceed forward from here to Cliffside Asylum. Once we get there, I want you all completely buttoned up, with not one square inch of skin or fur exposed. That means you use your tail bags." He paused at the general groan from the officers. "Also keep your eyes on your partners. If you even _think_ they've been hit by a round or otherwise exposed to Night Hunter, hit them with the Night Howler antidote injector pens that the hospital has provided us. Furthermore, until I give _express orders_ , you will confine yourselves to less than lethal force. That means trank rounds or tazers. I know the stakes here, but we are here to serve justice, not extract vengeance. Never forget that.

"Your priorities are as follows: First and foremost, prevent the dumping of the suspected containers of Night Hunter into the river. Second, arrest and detain the suspect known as Volkov and any of her associates, especially the ones involved in the assault on Officer Hopps and the kidnapping of her parents. Third, secure the safety of the civilian informant in the asylum. Officer Wilde will provide a description."

Wilde stepped forward. "Our civilian informant is a Fennec fox named Finnick. Yeah, that's an alias, no I don't what his real name his. He didn't offer it, I never asked. He's about a foot and a half tall, with golden brown fur and brown eyes. He's a genetic dwarf, so he's an adult but can pass as a kit. So short, light brown, really big ears. He's also kind of an asshole on the best of days, and this is not one of his better days. He reported being hit with the Night Hunter poison, so you are to assume he is dangerous and not in control of his emotions and actions." Wilde paused and ducked his head briefly, before continuing. "He's also one of my two best friends in the world, and he's in a lot of trouble. My other best friend is in the hospital and might not ever wake up. I don't want to lose either of them, understand?"

There was a genera murmur of sympathy from the gathered officers. Wilde swiped the back of his palm over his eyes once, then stepped back to allow Bogo to continue.

"All right!" the chief shouted again. "You know the plan, you have the training. Let's do this right, and keep Zootopia's citizens safe. Now mount up!" Bogo waved for Wilde to join him in the nearest police cruiser. As soon as they were both strapped in, Bogo hit the accelerator, heading out onto the boulevard, a line of cruisers and trucks behind them, police lights remaining off for now and the headed into the pre-dawn darkness.

"What's the old saying?" Wilde asked, looking at the deep red glow growing in the east. "Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning?"

"Meant there was a lot of water in the atmosphere, and the day's heat would soon stir it up into a storm," Bogo rumbled. "A big one."

"Yeah," Wilde agreed, and pulled his suit up, face hidden behind the suit's built in rubber mask, "a big one."

They rode on into the dawn.


	16. Falling Down

_It's a mask, not a muzzle,_ Nick told himself firmly. The heavy rubber gasmask of the suit covered his face from nose to the base of his ears, his peripheral version caged by two small, oval Plexiglas windows, inducing a feeling a claustrophobia that was hard to shake. He breathed in, tasting rubber in his mouth, the airflow restricted slightly by the mask's filters, though not enough to choke him. His paws were inserted into equally heavy rubber gloves, little foam pads at the fingertips sheathing his claws so they wouldn't tear through the rubber and expose his skin and fur to the toxic Night Hunter again. Over all of this was the protective suit, canvas coated with baby blue dyed rubber, like a baggy, heavy space suit. The sun wasn't even up yet and he was already panting into the mask, sweat pouring down his back and gathering in the suit's feet.

"Time check," Bogo called into the secure com channel, standing beside Nick on the riverbank, similar clad and probably just as miserable.

"Ten minutes until dawn, Chief," Clawhauser replied, safe back at the precinct house as he coordinated communications.

"Thank you. All units, com check, roll call order."

The rest of the team, two dozen officers in all, called out their names over the radio. Nick dutifully reported, "Wilde here."

"Wolfowitz here," came the last voice.

"Team One?" Bogo asked.

"In position."

"Team Two?"

"In position."

"Aerial units?"

"In position."

"Rescue Team moving out," Bogo confirmed. "All units hold until my signal. Wilde, time to make contact."

"Right." Nick climbed into the inflatable rubber raft sitting half into the river, the Chief shoving off and climbing in behind him. The boat's electric motor hummed, guiding them towards the back of the asylum, and not incidentally towards the enormous waterfall it straddled. He pulled out his mobile, hit Finnick's number awkwardly with his gloved fingers, and hoped Clawhauser had successfully made the Bluefang connection to his headset.

"Yo, this is Finnick. Leave a message. I might get back."

"That wasn't funny the first time, Finnick," Nick growled.

"Hey, I gotta do somethin' to amuse m'self. Beats listening to Crazy Chick out there."

"Where is she?"

"Talking to her homies inside the lobby. I can see her from the vent I'm near."

"What's she saying," he demanded.

"Do I look like I speak Russian? From the sounds of it though, it's all 'Blah, blah, blah, we're the greatest. Blah, blah, blah, New World Order.' You know."

"How many do you see?"

"Maybe a dozen. The big ass polar is beside her, another one by the lobby door, and about ten wolves listenin' to her shit."

Nick quickly relayed the information to Bogo as the inflatable boat bounced against the asylum's superstructure, held in place by the current. "I don't think we're going to get a better chance than this, Chief."

"Agreed. Get climbing, Wilde." Bogo lifted Nick up to a barred window at the base of the superstructure. Working quickly, Nick molded small thermite charges to the bars, lighting each one and then shielding his eyes as they burned through. He pulled them off and tossed them into the river, taking a chance and breaking the window with a small hammer, counting on the sound of the smashing glass to be covered by the roar of the waterfall as he knocked the pieces out. Then he was pulling himself inside, Bogo following awkwardly as he squirmed his bulk through the window.

They found themselves in a small storage room, disused for some time going by the dust in the air. _Well, at least with these damned masks on we don't have to worry about sneezing_ , Nick thought. He got back on the phone. "Finnick, we're inside," he said softly. "Can you crawl down to the basement? We're in a storage room. Just make your way to us and we'll make sure you get the antidote and watch your back when while we arrest Volkov."

"Don't think we got that much time, Nick. She's finished up yakking and they're heading to the doors."

" _Shit_ ," Nick cursed. He turned quickly to Bogo. "They're moving out, Chief. It's now or never."

"All units, suspects are moving. Proceed as ordered!" Bogo called into his radio.

Over the roar of the falls, Nick heard the beating of helicopter blades, as two ZPD aerial units rose above the ridge of the flanking hills, shining their spotlights on the left and right side entrances to the asylum, the amplified voice of the lead pilot shouting, _This is the ZPD! You are under arrest! Lay down any weapons and leave the building peacefully. Repeat! Lay down any weapons and leave the building peacefully!_

Though he couldn't see it, Nick could visualize what was coming next. From either end of the bridge connecting the asylum to the mainland, ZPD cops would be approaching, elephant, rhino, buffalo and other megafauna officers up front with bulletproof riot shields protecting themselves and the line of smaller officers behind them.

"Finnick! You need to get down here right now!" Nick called. "They're going to be firing tear gas!"

"Yeah, I see that! Watch yo ass!" The phone clicked off.

Nick rattled the door handle and found it to be locked. He turned to Bogo and managed to grin as he said, "Uh, Chief. I think this situation calls for your specialized training."

"You're hilarious, Wilde," Bogo growled. The chief backed up a pace, then charged forward, slamming his shoulder into the door. It snapped off its hinges and crashed into the wall on the opposite side of the hallway. Then he turned to glare down at Nick and said firmly, "If I hear a word out of your mouth about me and china shops, I'll put you on report."

"Having seen you dance at Gazelle's last concert, I would never dream of making such a crass remark about your physical dexterity," Nick assured him.

The chief grunted in what almost sounded like amusement. "You must be feeling better if you can crack stupid jokes. Come on."

Nick followed behind Bogo as the chief drew out his taser, keeping it aimed at eye level while Nick lighted the way with his flashlight.

"Clawhauser, what's the situation?" Bogo called into his com.

"Teams One and Two report that they've secured the causeways," Clawhauser called back. "All the barrels that were sitting out there have been accounted for."

Nick felt his shoulders sag in relief. "So it's over. They're trapped. We grab Finnick and get him out of here, and then we can just gas or starve them out until they give up."

"It can't be that easy," Bogo muttered. They moved carefully up the hallway towards the stairwell. "Get your buddy back on the line, Wilde. I won't be happy until we've got him to safety."

"Me neither," Nick agreed. He dialed Finnick's number again. It rang several times, and he felt his stomach begin to twist in worry, before it finally picked up. "Finnick, you there?"

"The little junior detective is occupied, I am afraid," came the answer. The voice was female, vastly amused, and terrifyingly familiar.

"Volkov! What have you done with Finnick?" Nick shouted into the phone.

"He's right here beside me. If you want him to stay alive, you'll meet me on the roof," she said.

"Let me talk to him first."

"Mm, let me think about that. No."

"Let me talk to him, or there's no deal," Nick repeated.

The vixen chuckled. "Who says I want to deal?"

"You're trapped, Volkov. Unless you've got a helicopter handy, or you're an Olympic high diver, there's no way off that roof except through a line of police. Now let me speak to Finnick," he said, his paws bunching into fists inside the thick rubber gloves of his suit.

"I will be generous, and let you speak to him," she finally agreed. "Say hello to your father, little one."

" _Daddy?_ " came a fearful, high-pitched voice. It took Nick several precious seconds to realize that it was Finnick, in the little fox kit's voice he put on when they used to run their father-son scams. _She doesn't know he's an adult. Finnick, I think I_ _ **love**_ _you._

" _Son_ , are you all right? How did they find you? Did they hurt you?" Nick demanded, while he could see Chief Bogo's eyes widen behind the lenses of his gas mask.

Finnick sniffled once. "The lady has a gun. She heard me crawling in the vents and had one of the big polar bears yank it out of the ceiling."

Nick put on his best angry-fearful daddy act, not that it was too hard to sound scared at this point. "I thought I told you to stay at home!"

"But I just wanted to help! Please Daddy, I'm scared! She says she's going to hurt me!"

"I'm not going to let that happen, son. You just stay calm. Daddy is going to be up there in a minute. You can count on it." He waved at Bogo to start moving towards the elevator. "Put the lady back on the line."

There was the sound of the phone jostling, and Volkov's voice came back on the line, "A single father, how sweet. Tell me, were you divorced, or _widowed?_ "

"You hurt Finnick, and there's no hole deep enough for you to hide in," Nick growled as they stepped into the elevator.

"Better hurry then." There was a squeal, as if small child's ear had just been tugged hard. "I'm getting _impatient._ "

"We're on our way up now," Nick said, hitting the button for the roof and hitting mute on his phone.

Chief Bogo stared at him for a moment as the elevator moved upward, then finally asked incredulously, " _Daddy?_ "

"We used to pull a father-son scam all the time back before I became a police officer," Nick explained. "Like I said at the briefing, Finnick can pass as a kit when he wants to. It looks like that's what he's doing now, to put Volkov off guard. It might be an advantage somehow."

"Maybe," Bogo agreed reluctantly.

The elevator _dinged_ and the doors opened up onto the roof. Nick and Chief Bogo stepped out, to find Volkov, silhouetted against the rising sun, standing in front of them near the last remaining barrel of Night Hunter, sitting hallway over the edge of the building. She had one arm wrapped around Finnick's neck, forcing him onto his tip toes, holding him like a shield in front of her, the muzzle of her gun shoved into his ear. "That's far enough," she said. "Put your weapon down," she told Bogo, who was pointing his taser right at her.

"No, I am not disarming myself in front of an armed suspect," Bogo growled back at her. "Let go of the child and surrender."

"No," Volkov replied serenely. "You are going to let me and my soldiers go, and then you are going to _watch_ as Zootopia consumes itself!"

"Soldiers?" Nick asked. "What, you think you're an army now?"

She grinned wickedly at him. "Soldier, terrorist, freedom fighter; they're all words to describe the same thing; someone who is willing to spill blood for their cause."

"Sowing chaos isn't much of a cause, Volkov," Nick pointed out. "What do you get out of all this?"

"Freedom," she said. "Freedom from the collar of civilization that has been locked around the neck of every predator ever born in the modern age. We bow and scrape and play so _nice_ with our prey, pretending to friends, when they should be cowering at our feet, grateful that we let them have a portion of life before we feed upon them!"

"I don't _cower_ , Volkov," Chief Bogo rumbled. "I will give you one last chance to put your weapon down, before I fire."

"You do that, and I'll blow this child's brains out and let them fall into the river," she snarled, lifting Finnick off his feet and pressing the barrel of her automatic deeper into his ear. Finnick, able to keep his cool after a hundred cons, merely squeaked in supposed terror, though his eyes were giving Nick a look that said, _You better have a plan, jackass._

"Wait, wait, _w_ _ait_ ," Nick said, waving his paws urgently. He reached up and pulled the mask off his face, the wind at the top of the building shockingly chilly against his ears after being confined in his suit for so long. "Before you do anything, I just want to ask you one question."

"You're stalling," Volkov growled.

"Humor me," he said. "Like you said, you've got all the cards right now. We make a move, my son dies. What have you got to lose?"

"Fine, ask your question," she said, letting a smile creep up onto your face.

"Okay then." Nick took a deep breath, and asked, "Who hurt you?"

Nonplussed, Volkov's smile changed to an expression of confusion. "What do you mean?" she demanded.

He spread his paws in supplication. "Look, no one's _born_ wanting to burn cities down to the ground. Bellewether developed Night Howler to get back at all the preds that had put her down and dismissed her as just a cute little sheep over the years. I was a cynical sonovabitch for longest time because all the anti-fox prejudice I had to swallow. Who hurt you so badly that the only way for you to ease the pain was to make _everyone else's_ life miserable?"

Volkov's confused expression turned to one of pure rage. "You… you _pathetic, groveling, myagkoserdechnyy…_ " She sputtered in Russian for several seconds, too outraged to form words in English. Finally she spat out, "I am not some _weak_ , sentimental plant-eater! I was never broken, no matter how terrible the pain! And I will not take such an insult from _you!"_

Several things seem to happen at once. At a later point Nick would reflect that the total time couldn't have been more than a second, but his memory would slow events down so that every action was engraved upon his mind.

First Volkov raised her pistol, pulling it away from Finnick's head to try and aim it at Nick.

Second, before she could complete the motion, Finnick turned his head and bite down hard on her forearm, causing her shot to fly past Nick and Bogo and embed itself in the door of the elevator.

Third, Bogo, now that Finnick no longer had a gun to his head, fired his taser, the twin darts flying out, copper wires trailing, to embed themselves in Volkov's chest. Fur smoked and she began convulsing, flinging FInnick off the side to land in a tumbling heap on the tarpaper roof, as she fell backwards against the barrel.

Four, Nick saw what he missed earlier, the small two inch metal cap from the top of the barrel, sitting on the ground, where Volkov had dropped it, obviously intent on pouring the first load of Night Hunter herself from the highest point over the falls, with her soldiers to follow her lead when they saw the signal.

Finally fifth, he felt himself jump forward, crossing the gap in a leap that would have done Judy proud, fingers grabbing the edge of the barrel as it began to tumble, unable to stop it as mass and gravity yanked it over the edge, Nick and Volkov's bodies tumbling after it.

Nick wrapped his legs around the body of the barrel, jamming one rubber gloved paw almost up to the elbow into the opening, trying to ride it down for the seeming eternity of the fall, all the while thinking, _Twice! How the hell does one guy fall off the same damned waterfall_ _ **twice**_ _?_

Then the barrel hit the water, Nick atop it, landing with an enormous splash that rattled his fangs and sent a shooting pain into his forearm and shoulder. He let out a loud scream, only barely clamping his mouth shut in time as the barrel sank beneath the turbid waters of the river. The outflow of water from the waterfall sent the barrel tumbling forward, even as it continued to sink, finally bouncing against some muddy rocks lining the river bottom, the current clutching at Nick, trying to pull him free.

He jammed his arm deeper into the barrel's opening, trying to hold it in place even as he felt his lungs begin to burn from lack of air. If he pulled it loose, the contents of the barrel would flow out into the river, poisoning it. How potent was this stuff? Would just fifty gallons of poison be enough to effect people out of the millions of gallons of water that had to flow through Zootopian pipes every day? Volkov had about a hundred barrels that they had spotted, five thousand gallons. Would even that have been enough? Could he take the chance if he was wrong?

 _Helluva time to start believing in homeopathy, Nick_ , he told himself. He clung to the barrel, his free paw clamped to his muzzle, trying to hold back the stream of bubbles slipping from his lips as his lungs told to just open up and gulp in the water, damn the consequences.

 _Judy is going to so upset when she wakes up,_ he thought, closing his eyes as his chest spasmed, and he gulped for air that wasn't going to be there…

…only to feel it enter his lungs anyway, as someone jammed a mouthpiece between his teeth. Nick's eyes snapped open, to look into the face of an otter in an orange swimsuit, a scuba tank strapped to their back, the tank's backup mouthpiece pressed to Nick's face.

 _Of course Chief Bogo would make sure a water rescue team was in place, since we were operating so close to the falls,_ he thought, as the otter examined his predicament with the barrel. Because while Bogo might be an asshole, he did watch out for his officers.

Finally the otter reached into a pouch at his weight belt, unfolding what looked for all the world like a large rubber balloon. Weaving around the barrel, he run straps around it, then took a deep breath and attached his air hose to a valve on the balloon. It inflated rapidly, and soon Nick, the otter, and the barrel were rising to the surface.

Nick kept the mouthpiece clamped in his jaws as he breached the surface, feeling himself slip back down even as he held on, a rescue boat turning quickly towards him. By the time he was pulled aboard and the barrel secured, allowing him to finally pull his broken arm free, he was shivering violently from the cold. Soon though they had cut him out of his flooded hazard suit and wrapped in a heated blanket, as the boat steered gingerly with its dangerous cargo towards the shore.

"Finnick, the civilian, is he okay?" he said between chattering teeth.

"He's fine, sir," the otter said. "They've got him at the aid station. A few cut and bruises, that's all. Chief Bogo said you'd want to know."

"Thanks," Nick said. "And Volkov?"

"No sign. But we'll be searching the river bottom soon. She had to have drowned, falling like that after being tazed."

"Yeah," Nick agreed, slumping back down. Somehow he couldn't bring himself to believe it yet. For now though, it could be someone else's worry.


	17. Chapter 17

She was pretty sure she didn't want to wake up, or maybe she was finally awake enough to realize that she shouldn't be. At any rate Judy's body was sending signals to her that she was under some pretty heavy painkillers, and that moving would definitely be a bad idea right now. The only thing she could be certain of was the feel of someone's paw, bigger than her own, holding her right paw in a light grip.

She groaned softly, forcing her eyelids to break the thick sleep crust sealing them. She was in a hospital room, the lights dimmed, Zootopia's night time skyline visible through the half open curtains in the window. Beside her, Nick was sitting in an easy chair, dressed in his civvies, his left paw holding hers even as he slept, his right arm encased in a plastic cast.

"Hrr?" Judy said, her throat feeling raw. She gave Nick's paw a weak squeeze, and his eyes popped open. He looked down at her, his expression cautious.

"Hey, you with us yet, Judy?" he asked softly, squeezing back.

"Hrr!" she said urgently, looking up at him.

"Oh! Hang on!" he said, growing more excited. He grabbed a cup with a straw in it, raising it to her lips. She sucked it down eagerly, washing the gunk that had been filling her mouth and throat. "Easy there, Carrots. They just took the respirator out yesterday. How are you feeling?"

"Okay I guess, but I think I hurt my..." She paused, brow wrinkling as she took inventory, then finally finished with, "... _everything._ Nick? Wha... what happened? How long have I been out?"

He set the cup back down on the table. "What's the last thing you remember?"

"We were following... that polar bear... that had been casing the docks," Judy said. "The one that we thought was with that gang that had moved into town." Her brow furrowed. "I think he turned down an alley and I followed him... After that, it's all blank."

"Blank is good," Nick said. "Believe me, I was wide awake for it all. Short Version: you got hurt really bad, and it was touch and go for a few days, but now that you're awake you should make a complete recovery."

"Oh, Mom and Dad must have been so worried."

"Yeah, they were. They're downstairs now getting some dinner from the cafeteria right now while I hold the fort."

"What happened to your arm, though?" she demanded. "Did the bear hurt you?"

"No, that came, um, later, when I fell off the roof of the asylum." Nick's eyes shifted away, not meeting her gaze.

"Fell off the _roof_? Okay, start over at the beginning."

Judy listened as Nick outlined what had happened since she'd been attacked, letting out a short gasp as he described Mom and Dad's kidnapping, interrupting him to exclaim, "Wait, Clawhauser _shot_ the perp?"

"Yep," Nick confirmed.

"You do mean our Clawhauser, right? Sweet guy, little chubby, loves donuts?"

"In Zootopia, anyone can be anything," he said. "In Clawhauser's case, he's a cop who's eating his own weight in free breakfast pastries, thanks to his grateful colleagues."

Judy would have shaken her head in disbelief, if it weren't for the cervical collar still holding her neck immobilized. "All right, go on."

Nick continued, detailing his first encounter with the mad vixen Volkov, including his poisoning with the new Night Hunter poison. When his narrative began to stumble, describing his struggle to keep from harming her parents, Judy gripped his paw tightly in her own. "Hey, you did okay, Nick," she tried to reassure him. "You were able to fight it."

"It was close, Carrots," he said, gripping back just as hard. "If it'd been two falls out of three, I… I don't want to think about what might have happened. I'm sorry."

"Don't be," she said. "It was Volkov's doing, not yours."

"Yeah," he said. "Anyway, once we were taken back to headquarters, they injected me with the Night Howler antidote and I, um, recovered." He shifted his eyes away from her again.

" _Nick_ …" she said slowly.

He sighed. "I'm seeing the counselor, _and_ taking my anti-anxiety meds like a good boy." Nick went on, describing Finnick's urban ninja stunt, and the final confrontation with Volkov and their fall from the top Cliffside Asylum. "So anyway, they've been dredging the river for any sign of her body. Nothing has shown up yet, but with the currents being what they are in that area, they might not ever find anything. I mean, taking a header into a raging waterfall while convulsing from a tazer shock almost certainly means she drowned, even if she didn't break her back upon landing." He gave Judy a very sly fox grin. "I'm absolutely certain it's an assumption that won't bite us in the tail at a later date."

"I'm sure," Judy agreed with a smile.

"So, after they finished rounding up and processing her goon squad, Chief Bogo remembered that I'd disobeyed orders after he'd told me to stay home and rest instead of pursuing the case. So I'm on administrative leave without pay for the next six months as my disciplinary punishment," he finished with a shrug.

Judy's ear flattened in outrage. "Oh, Nick! That's not fair at all!"

"In a _completely_ unrelated coincidence, six months is about how much time your doctors figure you need before you can retake your physical and be cleared for active duty," he finished. Nick smiled, "So, do you think you might want an assistant physical therapist to help you along? I'll work for pawpsicles."

Judy laughed once, instantly regretted it as her body protested, and settled squeezing Nick's paw again. "It's a deal."

"Yeah, well, helping you get better is the least I can do." Nick's expression darkened again. "I was too slow, Judy. I was too slow, and you almost died because of that."

"Nick," she said carefully, "it wasn't your fault. You can't protect me every waking moment; neither could my parents when I was growing up, no matter how much they wanted to, or how much _you_ want to. When I applied to the ZPD, I did it knowing that putting my life on the line was part of the job. That's what it means to take the call to be a police officer, and it's not something I'm _ever_ going to regret. You shouldn't either."

"I…" Nick ducked his head briefly, his eyes watering. "Thanks, Carrots."

"You're welcome, partner."

 

The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story continues in "The Long Recovery of Judy Hopps".


End file.
